It looks like Apple may have killed the TV industry

televisionby Medhi

Cord Cutters And The Death Of TV – 
[Via Business Insider]

The TV business is having its worst year ever. Audience ratings have collapsed: Aside from a brief respite during the Olympics, there has been only negative ratings growth on broadcast and cable TV since September 2011, according to Citi Research.

Media stock analysts Craig Moffett and Michael Nathanson recently noted, “The pay-TV industry has reported its worst 12-month stretch ever.” All the major TV providers lost a collective 113,000 subscribers in Q3 2013. That doesn’t sound like a huge deal — but it includes internet subscribers, too.

Broadband internet was supposed to benefit from the end of cable TV, but it hasn’t.

[More]

TV is dying, both broadcast and cable. There are a ton of graphs in the article showing this.

And it appears that instead of watching TV shows on a TV, more and more are watch on mobile devices, such as the iPhone and iPad.

The iPhone jumpstarted the mobile market. without its easy ability to download and watch video, the destruction of TV might have not happened for several more years.

Not a good time to be a TV executive.

3 thoughts on “It looks like Apple may have killed the TV industry”

  1. The data looks to me more like a demographic shift than the death of an industry. Subscribership and viewership are not quite the same thing, and TV’s stranglehold over prime-time hours ebbing away is probably a good thing. I’m not at all worried that people will abandon TV; they merely prefer mobile, on-demand, low-res viewing enabled by new devices.

    1. I am thinking the TV industry as it has been formulated for a few generations – it requires millions if not 10s of millions to have a successful show in order to satisfy the business model. Watching video content will not go away. Just the broadcast company model. And probably a lot of the cable company model. Neither is built to be successful in the coming age.

  2. Then I supposed you’re real concern here is adaptive distribution,which the broadcast industry already faced when cable and satellite feeds replaced over-the-air transmission. The same thing is happening to journalism, the recording industry, and brick-and-mortar businesses, which have all been deeply affected by e-commerce and the dematerialization of goods and services. If demand for TV shows is waning, I suspect it’s probably just dilution, meaning increased competition for everyone’s attention. I can’t bring myself to feel badly about that.

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