How Viewer Habits Have Shifted from Primetime to All-the-Time

The first TV remote control was invented 75 years ago. Connected by wires, it controlled motors that cycled the TV’s tuning dials through the locally available stations representing four commercial TV networks (ABC, CBS, DuMont, and NBC) plus PBS and a few local independent stations. Initially, all programming was live; the invention of videotape in the 1950s enabled programs to be recorded and broadcast at a later time, but viewers could still only watch shows when they were being broadcast. Most entertainment programming was broadcast in the evenings, during “Prime Time,” enabling families to gather around the “TV hearth” and watch shows together between dinnertime and bedtime. Viewing was a collective experience, with tens of millions of viewers gathering to watch their favorite shows when they were “on.”

The Road to Fragmentation

In the mid-70s, consumer video recorders first enabled “time-shifting,” allowing viewers to record shows and watch them at their convenience—but they were relatively expensive and cumbersome to use. In the late 1990s, digital video recorders, such as TiVo, streamlined the process of recording and playback, changed TV viewership trends, and brought us “binge-watching”—the recording of multiple episodes of a program and watching them in a single session. Fast-forward to the modern world in which streaming services like Netflix and Hulu (which both launched in 2007) have transformed TV viewing into a random-access medium in which massive libraries of content are available for viewing at any time on devices that fit in our hands, sit on our laps or nearly cover entire walls of our homes. Viewers can choose whether to watch commercials or to pay to avoid advertising entirely. Fragmentation across content, platforms, devices, and time now means that only massive live events—think the Oscars or the Super Bowl—command the same real-time audiences that once gathered every evening around popular primetime programs.

The Demise of Easy Mass Reach

The fragmentation of viewership makes reaching a goal a challenge. Primetime broadcasts once enabled advertisers to reach nearly half of US humans at the same time: The Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969 had approximately 125 million viewers, and the 1983 series finale of MAS*H had 106 million viewers — 47% of the total US population of 227 million at the time, by far the most popular single primetime episode ever. While major events like the Super Bowl can still attract huge audiences, even tentpoles like the Oscars have dropped in viewership from 48 million in 1975 (compared to the total US population of 211 million; 23%) to around 20 million in 2025 (344 million population; 6%). The most popular primetime shows today rarely hit 10 million, and typical audiences for the largest programs are even smaller. Yet overall screen time is up 7.9% (29 minutes) since 2013, reaching an average of 6 hours and 38 minutes per day globally, driven mostly by digital video's unprecedented growth. For advertisers who could once buy huge reach with a single, simple buy, the question is not whether viewers are out there; rather, the challenge is how to find them efficiently.

Fragmentation to Focus

The days of mass-reach TV may be gone, but the massive explosion in the variety of TV content has brought with it an ability to focus on more specific, granular audiences within the linear TV ecosystem. While generic audiences may be harder to find in one place, by aggregating smaller audiences, marketers can build up reach in a more focused way, placing messages in the programming that resonates best with the people most likely to purchase their products and services. The availability of highly granular TV viewership data can be used to identify the best programs, networks, or dayparts in which to focus marketing dollars on precise audiences, while still taking advantage of the relatively low cost of traditional TV. Measuring ad exposures across multiple publishers and platforms is essential to optimizing video ad spending.

How Simulmedia Can Help

Re-aggregation of the audience isn’t a primetime problem; it’s an all-the-time problem, and not one that can be solved efficiently by a single publisher or platform. As ratings decline on individual networks, focusing too much on a single place means delivering the same ad more times to fewer people. This trend toward over-frequency is made even worse by uncoordinated buying across publishers, each of whom has no incentive to consider the ads already delivered by their competitors. Simulmedia provides the ability to reach audiences holistically and efficiently with the following capabilities:

• Data-driven planning that enables optimizing media plans to reach specific audiences on both linear and CTV across a huge breadth of different publishers and platforms, enabling scaled reach against the desired audience, however fragmented it may be
• Managed-service buying and activation that combines the best of efficient relationship-driven traditional TV negotiation with programmatic capabilities to ensure an intelligently managed portfolio buy, efficiently maximizing audience reach
• Holistic measurement enables continuous optimization across publishers, audiences, and business goals by combining detailed TV exposure and outcome datasets.