Word: viewership
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...television and sports. It did not take long for these two great American institutions to meet and tie the knot. But only recently did they fully realize how much they mean to each other. For the networks, sports programming is a surefire audience getter in an era of fractionalizing viewership. For sports, TV is the irresistible avenue to mass-audience popularity -- and almost unimaginable riches...
...question is, Will the audience go for an interracial soap opera? Perhaps so -- if NBC, lagging last among the networks in daytime viewership, can find the audience in the first place. The constituency keeps shrinking: the valued 18-plus female viewers are going out to jobs; advertising revenues are sluggish. Fighting back, the serials are dealing more and more with issues that were once controversial or plainly taboo: homosexuality, AIDS, child abuse, alcoholism, battered wives...
...view has had its share of duds. A Dirty Dancing concert last November drew fewer than 80,000 subscribers. Viewership for the Sinatra- Minnelli-Davis concert is still being tabulated, but will probably fall well short of 100,000. Still, the concert's packager, Showtime Event Television, is pursuing other big stars for PPV events, and industry executives are bullish. "We're building an electronic arena," says Jeffrey Reiss, chairman of Request Television. "The day will come when Bruce Springsteen will be playing pay-per-view at the end of his tour. We're betting on the future...
...more intellectually-minded, with a generous dollop of cynical elitism thrown in, counter that the media is bound by a higher responsibility. Don't cater to the whims of the beer-swilling couch potatoes, they say. Let's ignore those natty Nielsen viewership surveys and give the public some healthy programming...
Some already have. USA Today: The Television Show got a chilly reception when it first aired last week. Local affiliates and nervous advertisers reported that viewership was down significantly from expectations. In the hot Los Angeles market, the show racked up only half as many watchers when it went up against the sugarcoated "Entertainment Tonight...