With four kids under 18 at home, Patty Holliday was expecting an explosion of TV watching during the coronavirus lockdown. What she saw was a special edition of entertainment Darwinism.
Her 8-year-old daughter, the youngest, is the lone holdout for cable TV, a fan of the morning show “Puppy Dog Pals” on the Disney Junior network. When her siblings get up, negotiations quickly shift to Netflix and other on-demand options, like reruns of “Wizards of Waverly Place,” a decade-old hit on the new Disney+ streaming service.
“We’re all around, watching a lot of more,” said Holliday, a travel agent from Springfield, Va., who specializes in Walt Disney Co. vacations. “We are doing more streaming than watching the traditional cable channels.”
In another era, the coronavirus lockdown might have been a boon for cable TV networks, with hundreds of millions of Americans stuck inside with little else to do. But data from Nielsen show the traditional TV audience isn’t increasing. Instead, streaming looks like the real winner of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Amazon.com Inc. reports subscribers are up for its Prime service. Roku Inc., a leading maker of devices for online viewing, has seen a spike in orders. Shares of Netflix Inc., the streaming leader, just hit an all-time high. And its quirky documentary “Tiger King” has emerged as the streaming hit of the pandemic.
The shift to online viewing may be most pronounced at Disney, which is putting a lot of content on the Disney+ service. That includes original programming, such as a “High School Musical” reboot, and older shows like “Hannah Montana,” which is getting promoted on social media.
Prime-time viewers for the Disney Channel, a cable network, slumped almost 37% in the second week of April and 24% season to date. Disney+, meanwhile, passed 50 million subscribers globally last week, just five months after its launch.
With more kids at home, Disney Channel has made programming changes, including cutting back on daytime shows for preschoolers and adding marathons of shows popular with older kids. The company said ratings among viewers ages 6 to 11 are up on the Disney Channel, Disney XD and Disney Junior in the past three weeks, compared with the period before the COVID-19 lockdown.
But the overall picture for traditional TV remains dim. Prime-time viewers at the 35 largest cable channels have tumbled almost 7% in the season to date and were flat in the second week of April, based on the latest data available.
The virus and its impact on consumers’ wallets has prompted Convergence Research, a consulting firm, to predict that more than 8% of pay-TV subscribers will cancel their cable or satellite service this year. It sees 7.1 million cutting the cord in 2020, an increase from 6.36 million in 2019.
The FX network, also owned by Disney, is adapting as well. It’s producing original shows just for the Hulu streaming service, which is now controlled by Disney.
“Now you can watch things on FX on Hulu you can’t even watch on FX,” said Robert Thompson, a professor of media studies at New York’s Syracuse University. The virus, he said, is “accelerating an evolution already on its way.”
However, the pandemic is also changing the types of programs people watch. With live sports shut down, Disney’s ESPN has seen its prime-time audience tumble some 60%.
Cable news has scored huge gains, led by CNN’s more than doubling of viewers. Fox News programs accounted for all of the 35 most-watched prime-time shows on cable TV in the week ended April 13.
“The 24-hour news channels now have the hottest series in the world,” Thompson said.
Lifetime, owned by A+E Networks, reported its highest-rated movie in four years, a biopic about the gospel-singing Clark sisters that aired last Saturday. TLC, owned by Discovery Inc., continues to do well with its “90 Day Fiance” and “Little People, Big World,” two reality franchises in full swing.
True crime, a genre that boomed before the virus, seems to be flagging on cable — based on declining ratings for Investigation Discovery.
“People are looking to feel good and be uplifted in a time of crisis,” said Bernard Gershon, a TV industry consultant. “After you’ve spent an hour trying to order groceries online, all you’re looking for is a distraction.”
While the Holliday family has a full package of cable channels, many of their neighbors no longer do. That means the kids aren’t chatting with their friends about traditional TV shows. Instead, the family dove into a series of new nature documentaries on the Disney+ service, including one on elephants narrated by Meghan Markle, the duchess of Sussex.
Holliday, who’s also a blogger and TV critic, said her family finds it easier to binge watch an older show such as “Sherlock,” a British series on Netflix that her sons discovered recently.
“Everybody’s finding different things,” she said. “That doesn’t happen with the cable channels. As a group we can sit down and watch three episodes. One episode doesn’t keep us engaged as a family.”
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