We're still about a week away from the summer solstice, but it sure feels like summer already. The massive heatwave in Washington, D.C. this week helped set the tone, but the available programming on broadcast television also contributes. It's no secret that cable programming has been doing very well in recent years, especially as compared to broadcast television. Just one example is the growing number of honors that cable has won over the years. Lost, The Big Bang Theory and The Office have gone bye-bye for a while and instead we can look forward to I Survived A Japanese Game Show and Dance Machine. But one way to make it through the summer TV doldrums is to turn to cable television. I am reminded of this by two items from this week. On Monday, the NY Times' David Carr pointed out it's a Golden Age for TV? Yes, on Cable. Yesterday, Hamilton Nolan noted on Gawker: Cable: The Old New Big Thing. Carr said this:
However, for anybody with cable — and that includes most of us — television is in something of a golden age. Cable networks other than the fancy subscription services like HBO and Showtime used to be the realm of stupid human tricks and commercials for six-minute abs, but networks have shot by them in the race to the bottom. Channels like TNT, AMC, FX and others came up with their own versions of “Trading Places” and carved out niches, sometimes huge ones, by letting viewers know that narrative, quality and drama have not gone off the grid.
And Hamilton said this:
Networks must, by design, try for mass appeal. Cable channels can target their audiences much more effectively. The scary thing for networks is that even specialized cable channels no longer represent just a niche audience any more; they are almost as plugged into the mainstream as the networks themselves.
The success of cable is built on serving niches. As Carr said, those niches can get collectively pretty big. The Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau has a handy chart on its website showing the effect of summer: Ad-Supported Cable Viewing Shares Heat Up In The Summertime. It looks at all dayparts, but if we examine just one metric, we see that primetime ratings for ad-supported cable networks increased 17% from November '06 to July '07, while broadcast ratings went down 33% for that same time period.