Jimmy Gilmore – Writer – Director

I can’t tell you how many peo­ple have told me in the last year that TV is dead. Unlike the changes we’re see­ing in printed media, this couldn’t be fur­ther from real­ity.

Nev­er­the­less, the way we’re watch­ing TV has changed. But there are some mis­con­cep­tions about the way we’re watch­ing TV. For exam­ple, that every­one is using DVRs now and this is going to kill TV adver­tis­ing. Actu­ally, DVR use is up with older folks but the younger, more sought after audi­ence, is watch­ing pro­grams on Hulu. And Hulu is cap­tur­ing more money per eye­ball than tra­di­tional tele­vi­sion. Also, more peo­ple are also watch­ing pro­grams on mobile devices. Some pro­grams peo­ple actu­ally pay for on places like the iTunes Store.

So what’s the take­away here? Peo­ple are watch­ing. But TV isn’t just on the same old box any­more. So it’s going to take dif­fer­ent ways for adver­tis­ers to engage con­sumers than just run­ning a spot on the idiot box. And it’s going to take more than just sell­ing ad space from net­works if they want to con­tinue to gen­er­ate the same rev­enue from their programing.

Peo­ple still want to watch Lost but they’re just not so inter­ested in appoint­ment view­ing any­more with­out a really good rea­son to tune in on time.  Fox gave it to them with “tweet peats” and Barack Obama, CNN and Face­book hit a home run with the State of the Union. This is not to imply that social media the solu­tion to all of TV’s prob­lems, just one of many solu­tions that will be required for TV to adapt to a chang­ing world.

4r2i5skwbn