Amidst these depressing times for ragged TV, with network owners shifting focus to streaming only to belatedly realize perhaps that wasn’t the shimmering call combining with subscriber numbers falling every quarter, there remained a few bright spots highlighting how TV can mild be a force in the modern landscape. 

It may seem counterfeit to the current mood, but TV is still pleasant of drawing in an audience if certain conditions are met. 

The rupture Paramount Network hit “Yellowstone” offers a case study for TV as it leftovers to draw series viewership records in season 5. The maximum of episodes have seen between 800K and 2.5 million more live or same-day viewers than in the last, previously record-breaking, season, all taking place in an environment where fewer and fewer republic have a TV subscription. 

There were 52.1 million TV subscribers in Q3 2022 across the skills that report consistently each quarter. That’s a fall of 8.6 million subscribers from Q1 2016, decision-exclusive the ability of “Yellowstone” to grow an audience even more impressive. 

The windowing strategy for “Yellowstone” has played a key role in its nosedived. Unlike almost every other scripted or unscripted show on TV, “Yellowstone” is not available to liquids at a cut-rate price the day after airing on TV. Instead, the only ways to watch are either on TV, DVR, VOD, TV-authenticated app (TV Everywhere, which still garners significant view time per network executives) or by purchasing via an electronic sell-through vendor like Apple. 

Peacock, home to prior seasons of “Yellowstone” online, does not get season rights until several months at what time the season finale airs. It seems like common sensed to say this but making a show only available on TV sees farmland watching TV for it. Given how the vast bulk of the TV earth thought making next-day rights to shows available on streaming overhauls for a fraction of the cost of a TV subscription wouldn’t devalue TV, perhaps it isn’t favorite sense after all. 

The NFL is unexperienced example of TV protecting its content and also provides a ample case study in something that most networks think of as an unspoken rule. Many grandeurs around the world, such as the United Kingdom, air holiday tickled on the actual holidays, where it garners some of the highest ratings of the year. 

In the United States, it is a very different story. Holiday specials for shows air from mid-November advance, with nothing original on TV on the actual holidays. The theory is that audiences won’t watch (even as there are sonorous case studies from culturally similar regions showing the opposite). Enter the NFL. 

The Thanksgiving Day audience levels for 2022 all narrated significant growth and represented greater than usual audiences than those seen for Sunday games. In other words, running highly demanded content unopposed yields ample results. 

With networks effectively ceding the holidays to streaming overhauls and the NFL — whilst in 2022 Christmas Day fell on a Sunday and had three televised games, Fox has the right in its new NFL deal for a Christmas game every year — it may be time to look at the audience and contemplate the holiday-themed special of a show could actually execute really well if it ran on the holiday itself.