Changes_in_Prime-time
Harvey Nagler - Vice President, CBS News, Radio
The definition of prime-time has changed because previously, we would say prime-time was at certain particular hours. Now we no longer set what prime-time is, now the individual decides what they want to watch, when they want to watch, where they want to watch.
Robin Sloan - Vice President of Strategy, Link TV
And one of the things that we've found is that their viewing habits, their media consumption habits on TV and on the Internet are nothing like anything that we have grown to assume over the years. There is no prime–time anymore. It's not that people are sitting down in front of their TV at 8:00 to sort of see what's on. Instead they're consuming media over the course of the entire day. They're online all day, whether it's in their dorm room or at their office.
Terry Curtis - Communication Design, California State University, Chico
The programming that is on prime-time, first of all, a bunch of it is also available on Web sites, in order to accommodate the fact that there are lots of people who just won't watch prime-time TV, so if you want to reach them you have to go somewhere else, and they are very different kind of programming than they used to be. The whole concept that we are moving away from series shot on location and dramatic series to game shows and talk shows in, during prime time indicates that the budgets are not there, the audience is not there.
Harvey Nagler
The world has changed markedly in the last number of years. It is no longer the journalist or the media company that sets the agenda for when people will get their news.
Jeff Goodby - Co-Chairman, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners
Everything can be time-shifted now. So you can watch prime-time whenever you want. And that's bad news for the advertising business, obviously, because what that means is that people are watching everything in fast-forward and deciding what they want to see. And that includes the commercials. In fact, a lot of people are watching commercials in fast-forward now, and it's really changing the way that I think about commercials. I've watched commercials in fast-forward and I've seen, for instance, really first level things like type on commercials works really well. When you're watching them in fast forward, you can read the type as it goes by, and it actually gives you the message without the sound on and without slowing the thing back down to speed. So type becomes important, visual treatments become important. A card that comes up and kind of stays there forfive or six seconds actually is readable as it goes by in fast forward. That kind of stuff is, as I say, very first level, but I think it's important when it comes to the new world of the way that people digest things. We're going to have to give people a way to digest things in fast forward motion at sped-up rates. One of the things that we're doing right now with PepsiCo is we're actually making something that is just a slate that comes up and it says "Start Fast Forwarding Now" and you put that at the beginning of the commercial pod. And it's sponsored by a particular Pepsi product. It says "Start Fast Forwarding Now" so you fast forward through all the commercials, and then there's a thing at the end that says "Stop Fast Forwarding Now. Your commercials have just been propelled by Propel Water." Ok. So it actually takes advantage of time-shifters, you know, and thwarts them in a funny way. The other advertisers that are between those two things don't like it too much, but Pepsi likes it.
Terry Curtis
That concept of holding people to Thursday night at
Harvey Nagler
It's no secret now that news is on demand. People get news when they want to get it, not when the media companies say you should get the news.
Terry Curtis
And in fact, even TV in general is losing a big share of its audience, not just prime-time but TV in general, is losing its audience to all sort of things, things on the Web, video games, just a variety of other kinds of media content that people are more attracted to.
Robin Sloan
They get home, they're online again. They're watching TV with their laptop open, sort of bouncing between the two and looking up things that they're seeing on TV, and sometimes this will go on until two in the morning. So where's prime-time in all of that? It's really hard to say. And in some ways it's challenging because there's not a focal point anymore. It's something that's spread out over the course of the day and people are kind of dipping in and out of media as they get busy with other things. It means there's actually more opportunities to get people's attention, but it also means that eight o'clock on Thursday night is really not a big deal anymore.