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UK Broadcasters, Lazy or Just Clueless?
Tassium
Posts: 31,639 Forum Member
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This wind-down in summer thing, "saving the best programmes for winter ratings", is crazy.
Looking at the broadcast industry you would never guess their industry is facing tremendous competition, the effort is just not there.
Summer months don't lend themselves to heavy drama it's true, but the light frothy stuff is a perfect fit. Where is the live saturday beach-based bit-o-fun?
If the broadcast industry doesn't entertain people during summer then some other provider will step in. And will audiences eventually stick with that during winter as well?
Looking at the broadcast industry you would never guess their industry is facing tremendous competition, the effort is just not there.
Summer months don't lend themselves to heavy drama it's true, but the light frothy stuff is a perfect fit. Where is the live saturday beach-based bit-o-fun?
If the broadcast industry doesn't entertain people during summer then some other provider will step in. And will audiences eventually stick with that during winter as well?
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BBC and ITV would have trailers saying stuff like Autumn on ITV
No it isn't. It's using your capital to generate the best ROI. It's common sense.
The main competition during the summer months is the big ball of fire in the sky. Unless the general public are going to change the orbit of the Earth, they aren't going to be able to stick with it in the winter any time soon.
But for the BBC it is (or rather: should be) a different story. You'd think that they would be offering an alternative to ITV (and not just a different soap, news programme, quiz show or celeb thingy - different from the ones ITV is putting out). However, they follow the very same pattern, but for none of the same reasons. They don't benefit from advertising revenue, so there's no need for them to "save" their best shows for the autumn season - yet they do. It's not even as if they are dependent on autumn-released foreign blockbuster series for their headline programmes, like Sky are. So they could, if they chose, corner the summer market and screen their popular shows when other broadcasters don't find it economically viable. But they don't - they just follow the herd.
Clueless or lazy? sometimes they look the same.
American cable channels certainly aren't taking the summer off, and since I watch mostly cable series and few network ones, I am not watching any less American TV than I was four or five months ago.
I'll stop you there.
What about the main networks?
They have new stuff too, just less of it than they do from September to May. But why is that relevant? American TV is not only not synonymous with the "main networks," cable is where the great stuff is all year round.
Thats all I need to know, cheers.
So you edited my sentence that you quoted to add an anger emoticon at the end? Well, that's a form of immaturity I haven't encountered on the internet before.:)
The OP has a history of trying to dig out the BBC. So I'm making the assumption (probably accurately) he is attempting to dig them out and them out alone.
Thank you.
The BBC still have a tight budget, thanks to Jeremy Hunt and his six year cut. so they have to get value for money. Even repeats cost money, in royalty payments to producers, writers, actors etc. And would lead to yet more accusations of "nothing on but repeats"
The NHS isn't a commercial operation either, but they don't just hire lots of doctors and nurses when it's quiet and there are few patients to treat.
Not being commercial doesn't mean you can waste money, despite what some critics of the BBC accuse them of...
Why would not following the herd, because you are freed from the business realities that commercial operators face and can therefore exploit that freedom by offering programme content at times which would not be commercially viable for them, be "wasting money"?
ITV don't not screen new content during the summer because there's nobody to watch, they don't do it because that same content can get them larger audiences and larger advertising revenue later in the year. A point that the BBC don't have to consider.
The school holidays are a massive opportunity with a largely captive, bored audience ready and waiting (and nothing worthwhile on the other channels). For the BBC not to fill that "gap" simply because the other lot have sound reasons not to. makes no sense to independent observers.
It might, however, make sense if the BBC strategy was not to offer alternatives to commercial broadcasters for the benefit of the LF payers, but to seek every opportunity to go head-to-head with the other broadcasters and try to "beat" them and minimise their income by taking away viewers at the most profitable time of year, rather than work for the public good.
There's a sound economic principle called Comparative Advantage. It could (and if the benefit of the population was paramount: would) be applied to TV channels and the times of the year when they can acheive highest audience penetration. That way, they would all win by optimising their audience / revenues and the public would win by having something watchable for most of the year.
Sadly the lazy and/or clueless principle of "if they do it, we should too" seems to be the only game in town - hence nobody wins.
Because they would have made original content that fewer people would see.
A public service is more of a public service when more people use it if there is no additional cost to do so.
We know that there is demand for good quality TV during the summer. We KNOW it. So cranking out the old, wrong, notion that audiences are lower is just a waste of your time. For advertising-driven stations there are commercial advantages in scheduling their expensive shows for autumn. But the BBC doesn't have the same funding model, so those advantages aren't there. Yet they do it anyway. Even though there's almost no competition from the commercial channels.
That's the problem: the BBC merely follow the pattern of the commercial broadcasters, rather than doing what's best for their viewers.
How do we know there are latent audiences in the summer (if only there was something decent to watch)?
Simple: what was the most watched programme of 2013. In the whole year? (hint: it was in the summer)
Oh yeah, you say. Those were exceptions. Well the world is made up of exceptions and if you have enough of them together, they become the norm. Wouldn't it be "exceptional" for one channel, somewhere to screen a decent programme during the summer. Then they might get an "exceptional" viewer rating, too.
Actually we don't, and ALL the evidence points to the opposite.
Those are exceptions because they are event TV.
Event TV will get big audiences regardless of when it happens.
You are suggesting that that sized audience will watch a scheduled drama or comedy in the summer. That won't happen. If you take event TV out of the equation, audiences are much smaller in the summer.
Here's some real evidence from a programme which broadcasts all year round, Eastenders:
3rd July: 5.3m
5th June: 6.7m
1st May: 7.9m
3rd April: 7.4m
6th March 7.7m
6th Feb: 7.7m
2nd Jan: 8.6m
5th Dec: 7.7m
7th Nov: 7.8m
3rd Oct: 7.1m
5th Sept: 7.6m
1st August: 6.0m
I've taken the first Thursday episode of each month for consistency, and you'll see that for 9 months of the year the audience is pretty much the same. January's is a bit higher because Eastenders was on every day that week, and in a different timeslot.
During the summer though, the audience simply isn't there.
If you want, I can demonstrate exactly the same phenomenon with Emmerdale or Coronation Street, or the news. People don't watch TV during the summer, and outside of event TV they don't really want to.
Simply isn't there - what rubbish! A drop from (very roughly 8m) to about 6m shows that your description isn't there is completely bogus it's extremely "there" and well worth a TV station chasing. And since these are new episodes and they are broadcast during the summer, the BBC (and as you volunteer: commercial channels too) do consider summer broadcasts as worth the money.
It also makes one wonder how much of that drop is real and how much is masked by people going on holiday, so not watching at the time the show is broadcast, but catching up a week or two later when they return home yet not showing up in the published figures.
Why would a commercial station want to broadcast to 6m people in August when it can get 8/9m two months later?
They are not free from those business realities. Programmes cost money. Repeats cost money. Royalties have to be paid. Spending lots of money on broadcasts where there are not many viewers would mean less money to spend on content when there are viewers.
It's exactly the same with the NHS. They are not commercial but they have to pay for staff and facilities. That's why there may be only a couple of doctors on duty on a Tuesday morning. It's so they can save money they need to pay for twenty doctors for Saturday night.
When many folk leave the country for one or two weeks
Major annual sport is on Wimbledon, The Open
Every other year, Football and Multi Sport events
And many towns have festivals going on
Hollywood goes crazy with blockbusters