Broadcast TV Audience Aging FASTER Than US Population

For years, executives at ABC, Fox and NBC essentially stopped caring about television viewers once they had reached 50 years old. You don't hear that much anymore. The median age for viewers at those networks and CBS is now 51.

The broadcasters' audience has aged at twice the rate of the general population during the past two decades, according to a new report. It's a quiet trend with a real impact on the way they do business. "It should be a concern, but it doesn't seem to be a concern at the moment," said Steve Sternberg, who wrote the report for Baseline Inc., an information source for the film and TV industries that is owned by The New York Times Co. "You don't want to have CBS, ABC and NBC all having median ages in their mid-50s." The risk in having a rapidly aging audience is the networks becoming less relevant to advertisers, the backbone of their business. Increasingly, that's a way of thinking that itself is getting old.