Page 67 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

8
The streamlined audience disrupted:
impact of the new technologies

Until the early 1980s, the practice of audience measurement for American television was
a relatively stable and quiet business. For decades, Nielsen’s setmeter, the Audimeter,
measured household ratings, while demographic data were collected through a simple
family diary in which each family member was supposed to record which programmes
and channels he or she had been watching during a week. This two-track system was used
to determine the audience for programming on the three commercial networks, ABC,
CBS and NBC. The system generally worked, advertisers and networks were satisfied
enough. So long as there was a sense of balanced interests, there was no reason to
question the system as the fair and objective basis for negotiations and decision making.
In these circumstances, the available map of the streamlined audience could be used
unproblematically—much to the industry’s peace of mind. In this uncertain business, at
least one thing could be counted upon: that the regularities and patterns yielded by the
Nielsen ratings give adequate information about the viewing behaviour of the audience at
large. The ratings were the solid bedrock on which the industry lived: they told industry
managers, or so it was the common belief, who their viewers were. Ratings discourse
made the anonymous television audience visible in a neat and manageable way, and
viewers seemed to be content and happy, or at least happy enough, with what they were
offered. Otherwise, why should they keep on watching?
Since the beginning of the 1980s, however, all is not so quiet any more at the
television front: unprecedented things occur in front of the small screen, in the millions of
homes where the television set has conquered such a firm and central place. Gradually,
the certainties in which the industry could permit itself to luxuriate have been eroded.
One of the most obvious signs of that erosion is the steady decline of the three networks’
combined share of the national prime-time audience, from over 90 per cent in their
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heyday in the mid-1970s to less than 75 per cent in the mid-1980s (Carman 1987). What
happened? Where have all those viewers, on whom the networks could so reliably count,
gone? The answer is simple: the rise of new television-related technologies has provided
people with new options, new choices.
In 1987, about half of all American homes has a video cassette recorder (VCR). Also
49 per cent has been connected to a basic cable system, while 27 per cent has chosen to
subscribe to one or more pay cable channels, such as Home Box Office. All in all, thirty
or more channels can be received in 20 per cent of American homes, while two per cent
even have satellite dishes installed (TV World 1987). This means that viewers are no
longer stuck with the fixed schedules of network programming; they can now rent a film
from the local video store, or record a programme on their VCR and view it at a later,
more suitable hour, or watch one of the independent stations (whose number has tripled
to more than 300 in the 1980s) or the more specialized cable channels, such as the pop