TV is here to stay forever and the naysayers who predicted its downfall are wrong, and most probably work in advertising, according to TF1’s distribution head Fabrice Mollier.
Sharing a series of stats that made the case for free-to-air commercial TV’s healthy and ubiquitous future in Thursday morning’s session, ‘TV is not Going Anywhere’, Mollier argued that TV is at the very heart of video usage.
According to Mollier, in France, 4.6 million people watch TV daily in catch up regardless of which screen, while 45 million people watch live TV daily on a TV screen.
Mollier added that the ad-friendly millennial demographic is not pressing TV’s off switch as quickly as analysts once predicted.
Mollier took Europe’s most disruptive market – the UK – and demonstrated how TV viewing accounts for 57 per cent of all millennial digital video consumption.
TV also has the lead in millennial digital video consumption in France (93 per cent), Ireland (69 per cent), Switzerland (93 per cent) and Canada (62 per cent). One of the reasons the death of TV has been so greatly exaggerated was that advertisers themselves tended to underestimate TV consumption, Mollier claimed. In a study by UK commercial broadcaster ITV, advertisers tended to underestimate the amount of TV ‘normal’ people watched per day by almost 50 minutes.
He added that the truth was, despite a decade of disruption, standard TV viewing has remained resilient. Using the UK again as a case in point, where 89 per cent of households have access to the internet, TV viewing has remained static at three hours and 30 minutes per day.
However, whether TV would continue its resilience and defy its doom mongers is a moot point. Mollier said that TV would be around forever – but when the IBC session audience was polled only 20 per cent of the audience agreed with him, with 80 per cent giving TV just another 10 years.
