X Factor Or Strictly…... - 02 September 2010

My local radio station broadcast the news this morning that Simon Cowell is trying to persuade the BBC to move Strictly Come Dancing to an afternoon slot so it does not compete with his ITV based X Factor. Whether the BBC listen or not is a discussion in itself but this got me thinking.

The answer is it does not matter at one level because you may not care about either of these programmes. There is also another argument.

A reasonable percentage of TV is now distributed through broadband particularly through each TV channel's "Player". In addition another segment of the population also have Sky Plus or Sky Plus HD; and there are yet more who have other programme recording devices. One of the problems for TV media over the last few years has been a drop in advertising revenue and part of this has been caused by the introduction of recording devices. I no longer have to sit through the adverts.

If a reasoanble proportion of the TV watching population now record "their" programmes, does it really matter what time my programme is actually broadcast? If we assume there are 30 big channel brands out there with the capacity to broadcast 24 hours of TV the total amount of air time is 720 hours each day. If I owned a big programme what does it matter as long as my programme gets air time on one of these channels.

The big channel owners will of course say this is too simplistic but my son for example, never watches broadcast TV any more. I doubt he is alone.