Television's Future Vision

(Part 3)

The mass audience is dead!

The audience is changing, forcing the way in which television is made and delivered by program makers, broadcasters and advertisers to also change, or slowly and painfully perish. In the last ten years well-documented and major shifts in the patterns of daily living have occurred and with it changes in the patterns of daily viewing: more people are working late and so primetime is moving ever deeper into the night; more women are in the workforce affecting daytime viewing demographics; the audience is aging into a more comfortable "lifestyle" kind of television full of garden sheds, cooking pots and video postcards from around the country and the world; and most young people have more money to spend but are watching much less television - in fact spending far more time on so-called "intertainment" at VRcades and theme parks, in front of the latest video game and on the Internet and World Wide Web.

And the "nuclear" family is well past its half-life and fast becoming a mere statistical memory. No more the happy gatherings around the flickering electronic hearth, the endlessly chattering friend in the corner of the living room, with our favourite programs shared with the majority of the nation, and sometimes the world. Television has moved from the public, to the private family and, finally, to the personal domain - the "me television" of Nicholas Negroponte, Head of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab. At the same time as media moves to a global domain - as if to be deliberately contrary - it simultaneously diverges to accommodate local languages, images and cultures.

No more the glorious televisual past where:

"The advent of television hit the Australian community with a tremendous impact. Its early years were characterised by extremely high viewing levels. (Although with many less sets than we have today) In Melbourne, for instance, the June-July survey in 1958 showed a record 90.5% of all sets tuned in the average hour on the average day between 7.00 pm and 9.00 pm". (Colin Jones and David Bednall, "Television in Australia: Its History Through the Ratings", ABT, 1980, p 7)

Today a "forty share"- although nearly three million viewers out of a possible audience of over ten million - is enough to make waves in the television and advertising worlds and Channel Ten operates with far less of an audience and far less of a budget than Channels Nine and Seven - and still makes more money than Seven by concentrating on two lucrative youthful and female audience segments. And poor SBS valiantly and unsuccessfully tries to rise above its "narrowcast" share of 3% share to the lofty height of 6% of the audience.

Finally, the business plans of new pay ventures see ordinary television channels as merely a "loss leader", or loss-making attraction - like the gimmick at the front of the sideshow tent to get you to enter - to bring subscribers to new, on-demand interactive and telephony services where, hopefully, the real profits lie. All those years of work, all that investment, all those scripts, all these discussions we're having - it's all a "giveaway" at the front of the tent.

My, how the television mighty have fallen.