Television is increasingly for the old and the Internet is for the young, according to research by media analyst Michael Nathanson of MoffettNathanson.
The median age of a broadcast or cable viewer during the 2013-14 TV season was 44.4 years old, a 6 percent increase in age from four years earlier. Audiences for the major broadcast network shows are much older and aging even faster, with a median age of 53.9 years old, up 7 percent from four years ago.
These viewers are aging faster than the U.S. population, Nathanson said. The median age in the United States was 37.2, according to the U.S. Census, a figure that increased 1.9 percent over a decade.
To put that in context of TV viewing, he said, the audiences aged 5 percent faster than the average American did.
The research shows a sharpening age divide in the entertainment industry that has traditional media scrambling and newcomers, such as Vice and Netflix, establishing their own online empires.
“The shift in demographic viewing is caused by a combination of factors ranging from lower TV penetration rates of under-25 year old households to increasing use of time-shifting technologies in most under-55 year old households,” Nathanson wrote in a research report earlier this week.
For younger audiences, control over when and where they watch has driven the trend away from traditional television. Live TV viewing was down 13 percent for all ages except for viewers 55 and older, who are steadily watching their shows at their scheduled broadcast time.
CBS has the oldest audience, with a median viewer age of 58.7. CBS, which owns the rights to most of its shows and distributes broadly across digital and cable, hasn’t seen it hurt its bottom line, however. “NCIS,” one of TV’s most popular shows, is considered a billion-dollar franchise because it is viewed in dozens of countries, has a younger audience online and gets money from cable licenses. Fox has the youngest broadcast audience, with a median age of 47.8.
Cable channels, with younger audiences thanks in large part to a variety of content that includes children’s channels, saw the median age of its viewers climb 8 percent in the past four years.
The question is how the most valuable companies in traditional television will respond. ESPN, which is slowly putting some of its content online, hopes millennials will eventually see the value in paying for their sports programming.
At an event in New York on Thursday, ESPN President John Skipper said the company is experimenting with partnerships with Dish and new online products to lure younger viewers.
And he is part of one camp that believes young professionals and students will eventually become cable subscribers.
“We suspect they will trade up,” Skipper said.