USA: Cord-cutting not eating into pay-TV

Nielsen: Cable Commands 70 Percent of Prime-Time GRPs. Much as the digerati love to squawk about cord-cutting and the impact subscriber churn is having on basic cable ratings, the hard data doesn’t back up some of the more apocalyptic Chicken Little scenarios. But if the sky isn’t exactly falling, it is drooping noticeably.

Per Nielsen ratings data, cable deliveries are on a decade-long upward trajectory, and while growth has slowed in recent years, it has not seized up altogether. As it stands now, just a week before the second quarter of 2012 comes to a close, cable is on track to command 70 percent of TV’s total adults 18-49 GRPs in prime time.

That marks a tiny uptick from Q2 2011, when the cable networks accounted for 68 percent of all prime-time viewing, but it’s a significant leap from five years ago, when share hovered at around 61 percent.

In a show of obverse symmetry, broadcast continues its downward course. Ten years ago, the Big Four laid claim to 46 percent of all nightly GRPs; this year broadcast’s Q2 share is projected to fall to 30 percent.

A look under the hood at the individual broadcast networks presents a haves and have-nots landscape. In Q2 2002, NBC was TV’s top banana, averaging a 4.4 rating in the coveted 18-49 demo. Since then, NBC has plummeted 57 percent in the demo, closing out the quarter with an average nightly rating of 1.9.

CBS dropped from a 3.1 in Q2 2002 to a 2.1 (a difference of 32 percent), while Fox’s deterioration has been more gradual—3.0 to a 2.5, a drop of 17 percent. ABC over the course of the last 11 years has declined 19 percent, from a 2.7 to a 2.2 rating.

Full-season trends are largely analogous, as cable closed out the 2011-12 campaign with 65 percent of the prime-time GRPs, while broadcast commanded 35 percent. Cable first overtook the Big Four during the 2003-04 season, when it drew 51 percent of the demo to the networks’ combined 49 percent share.