For viewing, tech-savvy kids still prefer TV
NEW YORK — Grace Ellis has never known a time when a television was necessary for TV watching.
The fifth-grader in North Attleboro, Massachusetts, watches shows such as “Liv and Maddie,” “Jessie” and “The Lodge” on her laptop, iPad or phone.
“Sometimes I watch TV in the car,” she said. “I have ballet every day, so I watch on the way.”
Ever since freckle-faced puppet Howdy Doody ushered in children’s television nearly 70 years ago, each new generation of viewers has been treated to a growing bounty of programs on a mushrooming selection of gadgetry.
But nothing compares to the current wave: “The generation coming up now is used to having everything at their fingertips,” said Stacey Lynn Schulman, an analyst at the Katz Media Group.
Why not?
Of all the characteristics that set Kendrick Lamar apart — his blazing verbal gifts, his determined cultural politics, his resolute aesthetic modesty — perhaps the most unusual, especially in this era of hyperconnectedness, has been his particular blend of assuredness and indifference.
Excepting the occasional sidelong shot at a peer — one that’s fired down from the top of the mount, really — it often sounds as if he needed to hear only his own tick-tock for guidance.
But he has been listening all along, watching how others perceive him, feeling the shifts in their energy.
That’s the Lamar who shows up on the tart and punchy “DAMN.,” his fourth studio album, released last Friday. This is a work of reactions and perceptions, a response to the sensations that come when the world is creeping in and you can’t keep it at bay any longer without lashing back.
Two of the most striking examples of this recur throughout “DAMN.” In one, Lamar samples Fox News commentators responding
From birth, theirs has been a world of video digitally issuing from every screen. And for children, any of those screens is just another screen, whether or not it’s called “TV.”
“When they love a (show), they love it in every form and on every platform,” Nickelodeon President Cyma Zarghami said.
This keeps the bosses at each children’s network scrambling to make sure that wherever kids turn their eyes, that network’s programming will be there.
Still, children, it turns out, watch most television on a television — as in the old-fashioned, linear, while-it’s-actually-airing telecasts.
A new Nielsen study finds that in the fourth quarter of 2016, viewers ages 2 to 11 averaged about 17 hours of live (not time-shifted) television a week.
That figure represents a drop of about 90 minutes weekly from the year before, but kids also spent about 4 hours a week watching video content on other devices during the same period.
“Linear TV is still the lion’s share of where kids’ time is spent,” said Jane Gould, senior vice president for consumer insights for Disney Channel. “But it’s important for us to be in all the other places where they are as well.”
One reason: Those other outlets can pave the way for a new program’s arrival on television.
Gould pointed to “Andi Mack,” an ambitious young-adult comedy-drama that made its debut this month on the Disney Channel.
Weeks before the series premiered, it could be sampled on digital platforms, including the Disney Channel app, Disney. com, Disney Channel YouTube, iTunes, Amazon Prime and Google Play.
Grace Ellis is among the legions of kids whose attention was snagged by the megabuildup. When “Andi Mack” premiered, Grace was one of the 9 million TV viewers who tuned in.
When “Sesame Street” premiered on PBS in 1969, it joined a bare handful of TV shows (chief among them “Captain Kangaroo” and “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood”) devoted to lifting up their young audiences.
Nearly 50 years later, “Sesame Street” is going strong.
“PBS is still at its core,” said Steve Youngwood, Sesame Workshop’s chief operating officer.
So is televsiion overall, as demonstrated by the series expanding to HBO a year ago. Television currently accounts for 40 percent of its viewership.
Still, “Sesame Street” hasn’t stopped adapting to an evolving media landscape that these days finds 18 percent of its audience viewing on tablets, 14 percent on mobile phones and 25 percent on other streaming devices and computers.
That includes YouTube, where its program content has been a presence for some time. And it’s receiving special focus with the launch of Sesame Studios, which Youngwood described as “a separate production unit specifically for that platform.”
“We want to harness the power of YouTube to educate kids just like we harnessed the power of TV 50 years ago,” he said.
A half-century ago, “streaming video” was an unimagined wonder. But the TV landscape these days has been upended by this technology, and by major streaming-video outlets such as Hulu, Amazon Prime and Netflix as they aggressively vie for the attention of kids (and everyone else).
Netflix doesn’t disclose viewership figures. But according to Andy Yeatman, director of global kids content, “About half of our members around the world watch kids’ content on a regular basis. So it’s a very large, engaged audience.
In a bygone era with just a handful of TV networks, kids could count on finding shows aimed at them only on Saturday mornings and weekday afternoons.
Nickelodeon’s Zarghami pegs 2013-14 as the most recent turning point for children’s television — “when the landscape seriously shifted,” she said, noting how streamingvideo-on-demand providers began gaining a real foothold and supplemental devices such as tablets and mobile were taking off.