Web Videos Stealing TV Viewers, and Marketers
WHY are fewer viewers watching the new fall television series? Perhaps because they are too busy watching video online. — As broadband service becomes more available at home, the growing prevalence of video programming on the Internet …
Context & Ripple Effects
A week earlier, the Freakonomics blog asked whether web video is really hurting TV; this New York Times report answers with the advertiser's ledger rather than the ratings debate. The mechanism it names is home broadband availability, which the corpus treats as confirmed: more households can stream, so more viewing migrates off the broadcast schedule.
What makes the story matter beyond the fall season is the second confirmed relationship — marketers are already moving spending toward online video as TV audiences thin. The question shifts from whether audiences leak to who captures the budget when they do.
First-order effects
- New fall television series face softer premiere-season audiences because broadband-equipped households are watching programming online instead, directly shrinking the inventory TV networks sell.
- Marketers redirect advertising dollars toward online video placements, changing near-term revenue mix for both broadcasters and the nascent online-video ad sellers.
Second-order effects
- Networks come under pressure to make their own shows available online on their terms, since every viewer who streams elsewhere is a viewer their ad sales teams cannot count.
- TV ad pricing weakens at the margin while early online-video ad formats attract experimental budgets, forcing media buyers to build cross-platform measurement practices they did not need when television was the default.
Third-order effects
- If broadband adoption keeps climbing, video distribution structurally decouples from the broadcast schedule, and the industry's economics reorganize around whoever can measure and monetize streamed attention — a contest between network incumbents and internet-native distributors whose outcome was genuinely unsettled as of late 2007.
The trend: Rising home broadband penetration is pulling video consumption and advertising budgets away from scheduled television toward on-demand streaming, one upfront season at a time.