TV: the “only one medium that continually delivers mass reach”

Editor | 29-11-2012

The president of the trade association representing America’s commercial broadcast TV industry, the TVB, Steve Lanzano, is proclaiming a new eMarketer report as proof positive of the enduring strength of his industry.
Despite a trying year for its members, with the increasing arrival of alternatives to TVB’s members’ services, Lanzano says that an eMarketer report concluding that more consumers are watching more TV is “further confirmation” that TV remains the core of people’s media usage.
“eMarketer [found] that consumers spend more time with television now than at any time in the past four years. According to [its] research, the average adult spends almost 4.5 hours with television daily, representing nearly 40% of all their media consumption. Notably, television is the only traditional medium whose usage continues to grow. This is further confirmation that television remains the core of people’s media usage. While talk of audience and device fragmentation continues to grab headlines, there is still only one medium that continually delivers mass reach – television,” Lanzano added.
However, it should be noted that eMarketer also noted that decades of channel expansion have made fragmentation an indelible feature of the landscape and that this has yielded audiences that “appear large in aggregate form, but are actually smaller in real terms.”
The analyst added that the larger audiences are now dispersed across multiple screens and that people now stream TV content to their PCs and smart devices. The only conclusion, it cautioned, was that “with rare exception”, the mass audience accustomed to appointment viewing is long gone.