Viewer Retention Quotes

At the premieres, I always watch the audience. If a child asks to go to the bathroom, I know I've failed.

You know, we've got so much on Bravo and coming up on Bravo, and I think we have so much more going on than 'The Real Housewives.' And I think 'The Real Housewives' is a great, you know, great addition to the portfolio. I think it brings a lot of viewers under our umbrella. And I think they stay and sample other shows.

Television is not an easy medium, as keeping the audience glued to the TV screens day after day is something which requires a lot of effort.

It's tricky to do a serialized show and not lose viewers along the way because you really have to watch every episode.

We never want the audience to get bored.

It gets harder and harder to succeed and find audiences with the 500-channel universe, the remote control, and people being so trigger happy with that remote control. It just gets harder to get a foothold.

I don't feel the obligation to have a big explosion in the first 20 seconds so the audience doesn't turn on another channel. We are trying to make something that looks like a feature film that was bought for television and I think we are succeeding.

Like everyone else, I don't want it to get too far away from the racing because as time progresses, we're trying to get new fans and still keep the old fans and we've still got to have the racing.

I think everybody in news understands that the audience that watches for more than an hour is not your target audience - because those people are on life support.

In the movies first impressions are everything. Or, to put it less drastically, in the movies there are no later impressions without a first impression, because you will have stopped watching. Sometimes a critic persuades you to give an unpromising-looking movie a chance, but the movie had better convey the impression pretty quickly that the critic might be right.

There's certainly pressure to find your audience early. You need to paint the picture, but it's tough trying to find the balance between a show that people can tune in on any given week while still grabbing the people who are there every week.

The audience determines whether they still want to watch you or not.

People have a very short attention span when it comes to television, but nobody forgets the movie you do.

TV is tricky. You can do some stuff and people will tune out and never tune back in. It's sort of like putting a bad taste in somebody's mouth. Some people may not ever tune in again. And then there's some people that will tune in just to tune in and see what's gon' happen.

I'm always thinking about the viewers.

When you're writing for the screen, you have to be hyper-conscious every moment of how the audience is going to react. If you write just one scene where the audience is confused or it breaks their concentration in some way, then you've lost them, and you might never get them back.

You know, a TV show is a slow build.

TV always wants more people to be watching.

But with 9/11, we found that people tended to come back to the networks and the people who had been our core viewers in the past came back and they have stayed with us.

In TV the main purpose is to have them keep their hands off the dial. In movies, where you have a captive audience, the opening is intrinsic to the film.

You really have to keep people interested, at all times, until the punch comes. You can do that with a film that lasts 90 to 100 minutes. That's very difficult to do at 160 minutes.

It was the first thing I learned when I started. An old boss said to me, 'Your job is to reflect interest, not to create it.' And what I've taken from that is, if you're not talking about things people are interested in, then they're going to find someone who is. It's not any more complicated than that. But if you forget it, you won't have a show for very long.

If you don't have something that glues the audience to the screen, you're in trouble.

You don't want to bash viewers over the head with a blunt message or lecture them - they'd soon get bored with that.

If you're not entertaining, what the hell's the point?