Audience Share Quotes

We'll never see national shows with 45 shares again.

Many people dismiss morning television as fluff, but the morning hours are where the money is.

I think its going to be continually tougher on the big networks as more cable channels do really interesting television. The big networks have a choice to make: Do we try to be all things to all people and get the shows that will deliver 20 million viewers a week? Are we the McDonald's of television? Or are we going to try to be more specific?

All three networks have always had a morning show but now cable of course is taking some of that audience away and a variety of other things, probably the Internet as well.

It is a fact of broadcasting that you've got to get the big audiences for the channel that you're on.

What's great about cable is that the ceiling of expectation is lowered because fewer people have to tune in for it to be a success. You don't need 23 million people a week like you do in broadcast.

If you're on Thursday night at 8:30, because the history of that time slot has been so disastrous, there's a hell of a lot of numbers pressure.

Cable penetrates 70 percent of American audiences now.

It seems like the real television networks, the amount of people that watch each network is going down and down, and the amount of people that watch each website is going up and up.

Unlike productions in the other arts, all television shows are born to destroy two other shows.

There seems to be a vulnerability at the networks in late night. They are losing more and more audience, particularly young viewers who are now looking at cable television. 'Tonight' is an old show. CBS has reruns, and having a public affairs series like 'Nightline' on ABC is a big mistake.

We would like to be the third-most-watched news channel in the U.K.

Television is more of a business. You can't take as many risks, because there's so many channels now, and the advertising's dropping.

Cable has come along; many all-news 24 hour cable outlets in the United States. They have cut deeply into the traditional networks' viewing audience.

The problem with TV now is that there's so much competition, that you're always on the chopping block.

It's always about bringing in the numbers, the viewership. That's what gets you the money.

We thought we were going to go up against SNL on Saturday Nights - that would have changed things so much that it's almost impossible to speculate what might have happened.

A show like the 'Only Fool and Horses' Christmas special got 24 million viewers, so practically everyone in the country was watching. But of course it's a different world now, with so many channels. And those kind of figures are really difficult to achieve.

There used to be three networks, and now there are 40 million networks. There's a lot more competition out there, too. We would bring in 27 million people. Now, they're lucky if they have 17. I looked at the ratings, for the first time in 25 years, just to see, and there were 130 shows on. There used to be maybe 30.

Succeeding in network prime time has gotten tougher. Every day, several thousand homes are wired for cable, and more people are buying videodisks and video cassettes. That all represents competition.

I knew on the day that I accepted my job at CNN that a ratings victory at 8 P.M. was going to be a formidable challenge. As I have been told over and over, this is the toughest time slot in cable news.

Honestly, I don't know enough about what's a good timeslot and what isn't. Either you have a timeslot where nobody is really tuning in, which isn't good, or you're in a good hour, and then you've got a lot of competition.

The thing that interests me least about the radio business is the radio business. But I've had to learn a little bit about it. It's not rocket science: You get ratings, that's good.