FTA soon DOA?

It won't be long into the new year until the free-to-air TV network bosses in Australia -- especially those at Channels 9 and 7 -- resume their war of words over who's got the biggest ... er, ratings. But behind the bravado must be the realisation that they're in a business that's shrinking. While their second (and soon third) digital channels will extend their profitability in the short term, the networks will never be the licences to print money they once were. Long gone are the days when a large percentage of the audience would gather around the TV to watch a single program, such as the MASH finale. At least not at the same time and on the same channel. According to blogger David Dale, the biggest TV audience this century was for the Hewitt v Safin Australian Open tennis final in 2005, which scored 4.04 million viewers for Channel 7. That's about one in five of the Australian population. In the previous century, more than 6 million people (one in three Australians) watched Princess Diana's 1997 funeral, her 1981 wedding to Prince Charles and the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games opening and closing ceremonies. But these are among the exceptions rather than the rule. Today an audience of two million -- one in 11 Australians -- is regarded as something to celebrate at the networks. On an average night, perhaps on one in six of us are even watching FTA television. The rest of us are doing something else -- including a growing number who are on computers, some of them (often illegally) downloading exactly what they want to watch and watching it when they please. And that, of course, is the future of what we now call television. The real money will be in the production of shows that people want to watch, however, whenever and wherever they choose to watch them.
PS: The top-rating show on FTA in the US last week -- Sunday Night Football on NBC -- was watched by 19.04 million people. That's only 1/27th of the population. Even allowing for the silly season, it's clear FTA ain't a powerhouse any more.