Niche TV channels - the BBC's experience

The last post was about the BBC's failure to make it BBC Three channel work (aimed at the young audience). The diagram in this post show the weak way in which age, other than for the very young (under 5s), works as a way of creating niches.

On reading the report in detail and then an article in Marketing Week I have slightly changed my mind about the validity of the report's conclusions. Have a look at the report and tell me if you agree with the letter I have just sent to Marketing Week.

Torin Douglas is right to question the conclusions of the Barwise report about the BBC’s digital television services. The report concludes that: “Television is a mass medium, with only weak segmentation, not a niche medium”

Since the BBC has committed 80% of its resources for new services on channels targeting viewers under 35 years-old Barwise rightly focused on the connection between channel viewing and age.

He identified a critical flaw in the BBC’s strategy: “The implicit assumption continues to be that TV audience behaviour is sufficiently strongly segmented to justify the cost and inefficiency of targeting programmes at specific groups. The main segmentation variable in this strategy is age“.

Every shred of evidence in the report showed that other than at that extremes of the age spectrum (the under fives) the targeting of a channel at a specific age group did not work. Age is a poor way of segmenting markets and TV channels are no exception.

So far so good and so far he cannot be faulted.

Where Mr Douglas is right, is questioning the evidence in the report to generalise the conclusion about niches to factors other than age.

Not only did the BBC set itself a questionable objective of spending so much money on a narrow age band it was bound to fail. You cannot conclude from this that all forms of niche TV channels, not based on age, will suffer the same fate. Dick Stroud: www.20plus30.com




BBC Viewing Figures