Trendspotting: Without Live Sports, Linear TV Is Dead

NewsWire: 7/14/22

• Last year, 61 of the top 100 most-watched shows in primetime TV were sports. Scripted TV, in comparison, accounted for just over half as many top broadcasts with 32. (Axios)
• NH: It’s no secret that Americans are abandoning linear television for streaming services. But what programs are people still watching on regular TV? 
• 61 of the top 100 most viewed primetime broadcasts of 2021 were sports games. A whopping 1.1B viewers watched these live sports events. And NFL games brought in the most eyeballs (660M). Altogether, football alone accounts for just over half of the total number of viewers of the top 100 broadcasts.

• Scripted shows were the second most-watched genre, making up 32 of the 100 most viewed broadcasts. These shows were mostly CBS procedural crime dramas like NCIS and FBI, whose viewers are mostly Boomers. 60 Minutes, a "good government" favorite for the Silent, skews even older. We know that the median age of a CBS viewer is 63.2. And it tracks that older consumers have not completely converted to streaming. How much future is there in the Law & Order whodunnit genre? Given the demo, probably not much.
• We previously wrote a NewsWire on why USA Network needs live sports to survive. (See “USA Network Now Needs Sports to Survive.”) In the wake of USA's declining viewership, USA's owner NBCUniversal shuttered NBC Sports Network and moved its offerings over to USA. It’s now a coveted channel with both live sports and original series. IMO this is the future of television: fewer channels that leverage live sports. 
• Of course, streaming services are also trying to get into the sports world. Apple (AAPL) has signed a 10-year contract to stream Major League Soccer games beginning in 2023. It will pay the league about $200M annually. And starting in 2022, Amazon (AMZN) will exclusively stream Thursday Night Football for the next 11 years. It will pay the NFL $1B annually. Nevertheless, many sports leagues still have contracts with the networks lasting into the late-2020s. Streaming services will therefore have to wait until they can outbid the old networks and dominate the market.