Faced with new competition, they fight to hold their viewers
Click, click, click. Let your magic channel selector take you on a ramble through the satellite night. Three basketball games fill the sports stations: one pro, one college, one high school. Cable News Network is airing its 30-min. business report. With Mick Jagger and Joan Jett setting the tempo, MTV rocks all night. PBS has opera in German and soap opera in the Queen's English. In the free-for-all called cable access, gurus and do-gooders are proselytizing for churches without disciples, causes without effect. A raunchier access channel offers the spectacle of a young man tap dancing as he undresses to the theme from Star Wars. Click.
Hearst/ABC 's ARTS is devoting 75 minutes to a leisurely documentary on Caravaggio. HBO and Showtime make capital out of new movies, and the nationwide "superstations" beam Greta Garbo and John Wayne to more than 25 million homes. The local independent channels thrive on TV reruns: you can catch Mary Tyler Moore every night and M-A-S-H ten times a week. On the 24-hr. Cable Health Network, a psychiatrist is either preventing or precipitating a woman's emotional collapse. On an ad hoc network formed by Mobil Oil, the Royal Shakespeare Company revives Nicholas Nickleby and the sagging post-holiday spirits of 10 million viewers. And on each of the three "major" networks, a cop is still chasing a crook, another teenager outsmarts her sitcom dad, a nest of vipers buzzes in the bosom of one more TV dynasty. Click, click, click.
The Satellite Age of Television has arrived. With it has come a riot of options for the home viewer and a daunting challenge for the three commercial networks. Since the late 1940s, the networks have held a virtual monopoly on the viewer's prime time. Now that hammer lock may be breaking. In the next few years ABC, CBS and NBC will be vying—with one another and with some increasingly confident adversaries—for the lion's share of $16.7 billion and more in annual advertising revenue.
The numbers by which the networks measure their power—ratings, share points, Homes Using Television, demographics and the rest of the adspeak lexicon—are confusing and conflicting, but few network executives can take solace in them. The networks' portion of the total viewing audience has fallen from more than 90% in 1977 to 78% today, and a further drop of 8 to 14 points is expected by 1990. That is almost a quarter of the total market in twelve years. CBS, the prime-time champ since 1980, saw its 1982 ratings fall 5% from the year before; ABC lost 5%, and last-place NBC 7%.
Where have all the ratings gone? Some to the independent stations (whose share of viewers in the 18-to-49 age group has jumped 71% since 1978); some to PBS (whose audience has more than doubled in three years, to 5.3%), some to Home Box Office and Showtime (whose combined subscription base is now 15 million, up 50% from 1981), some to the burgeoning number of cable households (30 million strong, with 350,000 new homes each month), and doubtless some to video games, video discs and other plug-in software. Yet the raw number of network viewers has barely declined, because more Americans are spending more time watching television: the typical TV set is in use almost seven hours a day.