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CBS Exec: Death of Broadcast TV Has Been Greatly Exaggerated

NEW YORK – Despite the revolutionary changes that have been taking place in the TV sector in recent years, broadcast TV continues to do just fine – especially the networks like CBS that have embraced new technology and viewers’ demands to be able to watch what they want, when they want to and on whatever device they want to watch it on, according to Radha Subramanyam, CBS chief research and analytics officer.

“We fundamentally believe in the power of broadcast television,” she said Oct. 31 in the second keynote at the NYC Television Week’s TV Data Summit.

“The stories around the death of broadcasting have been around forever, but they couldn’t be more false,” she said. One example that proves that is the fact that broadcast TV viewing is up in 2019 from 2018, she said.

She conceded that about 50% of TV viewing is time-shifted now. But time-shifting has turned out to be “good for us, not the death of this business,” she said. “Time-shifting is just a fact,” but that’s “not a negative by any means,” she said.

Meanwhile, over-the-top (OTT) streaming video continues to grow rapidly, she also noted. But she pointed out that CBS was an early leader in OTT and has proven to be a positive for her company also.
Turning to the importance of TV viewership data, she stressed how important it is to not rely on just one audience measurement company for all of an organization’s needs. For one thing, certain companies are better at measuring OTT viewing than others, she said.

One lingering issue is that “co-viewing still remains undermeasured,” she said, noting that several people are often watching a program but only one of those viewers is typically being factored into any data, she told the Summit.

Subramanyam warned against the dangers of self-reporting – companies measuring their own viewership – and of trying to find a “holy grail” for all research. The latter is “pointless” because it doesn’t exist, she said, adding what’s needed is a multi-partner and multi-solution approach.

“We need to be much more flexible in our thinking than we have been historically because it’s a flexible, dynamic marketplace and you have to cut and choose and pick and do all of these things rather than waiting for that perfect solution and rather than complaining about it,” she said.

She went on to argue that TV continues to offer advertisers the highest return on investment (ROI) of any medium.

CBS, meanwhile, believes in “the power of small data and the power of big data,” she said. The company is bringing more research and analytics capabilities in-house and is also “doing a ton of R&D” investments in artificial intelligence (AI) and “working with a lot of partners” on that front, while also doing a lot of experimenting with different methods, she said.