You may recall last year that Modern Family creator Steve Levitan ruffled feathers when he made some interesting content about streaming content and its impact on ratings.
A year later, Levitan seems a bit more willing to embrace streaming content and time shifted viewing–but only if Hollywood is willing to change the model and account for all the eyes watching a show.
“The minute the carrot is lost, that we’re giving away things so much that we aren’t able to make the big syndication score… the ability to make big shows will be lost and the quality will suffer,” he tells the Hollywood Reporter. Levitan went on to say that the ratings system needs to adjust to not just delivering numbers for those who watch 24 hours after the initial airing of an episode as well.
“If there’s a big number that came out at the end of two weeks, and said here’s how it ranked when you add up all DVR, online and everything, that would more accurately reflect the audience,” Levitan said. “It’s not as cut and dry as they’re (Disney-ABC) trying to build a business on Hulu off of our show, without us getting the upside of that. I don’t feel that’s the case that much anymore.”
Levitan said Modern Family gets high DVR numbers, but doesn’t get credit for viewers of the comedy after three days, or those that fast-forward through the commercials.
The result is TV shows that don’t target the right age group or niche audience face the chopping block if they don’t deliver viewers that advertisers want to reach.
“If you have a show that caters to a technologically sophisticated audience, or a young audience who watches TV in that newer way, it may hurt you compared to a show that caters to an older audience, or an audience that is at a lower class socially-economically, where they tend to watch TV live, as it happens,” Levitan explained.
He knows Modern Family isn’t threatened by a failure by Nielsen to accurately capture online audiences as TV viewers increasingly watch what they want and when they want to on a myriad of digital platforms.
But other sophisticated comedies are threatened.
“Now some people are saying, that’s how they watch shows. That’s great, Just make sure we know that,” Levitan urged.
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