A study from The Diffusion Group on “must have” television finds the Big Four broadcast networks at the top of the heap by a comfortable margin. That said, seven out of the top ten viewer choices suffered erosion of support year over year.
ABC, NBC, CBS and FOX lead the top ten list in that order – the same as they did in 2011, although in the prior survey CBS was second ahead of NBC.
What’s more, all four were cited by better than 60% of those surveyed. No MVPD-only service was able to break the 50% barrier.
ABC led the pack with 68.4% calling it a “must-have” channel. While there is nothing wrong with being in first place, ABC should not allow complacency to set in – it pulled a 74.4% score the year prior. CBS suffered an even larger loss, dropping 7.7% year over year.
The biggest gainer was HBO, which improved 5.2% to 41.0%. SyFy and Comedy Central were the only other channels in the black.
Below are the TDG results for 2012 and 2011.
| 2012 | 2012 | 2011 | 2011 | ||
| Network | Rank | Pct. | Rank | Pct. | Change |
| ABC | 1 | 68.4 | 1 | 74.4 | -6.1 |
| NBC | 2 | 66.6 | 3 | 67.4 | -0.8 |
| CBS | 3 | 64.2 | 2 | 71.9 | -7.7 |
| FOX | 4 | 60.9 | 4 | 64.2 | -3.3 |
| Discovery | 5 | 47.3 | 5 | 48.9 | -1.6 |
| History | 6 | 45.7 | 6 | 46.1 | -0.4 |
| HBO | 7 | 41.0 | 8 | 35.8 | +5.2 |
| ESPN | 8 | 37.5 | 7 | 39.8 | -2.3 |
| SyFy | 9 | 35.7 | 11 | 30.8 | +4.9 |
| Comedy | 10 | 35.1 | 9 | 34.7 | +0.4 |
| Source: The Diffusion Group | |||||
RBR-TVBR observation: This is yet another piece of evidence supporting the notion that broadcasters are worth every penny of the retransmission consent income they make. Without broadcasters, MVPDs would not only be missing out on critical local content, including news, entertainment and emergency information. In short order, they will also be missing out on subscribers.
