A comparision of blunting, hybrid, and counterprogramming television strategies and their effects on total network television viewing

Since the late-1970s, the three major television networks in the United States have seen a steady erosion of their shares of the total television audience. Challenges from independent television stations and cable services offering alternative programs to those on the three networks have cost the networks more than twenty percent of their prime time viewing audience since 1980.

The networks have traditionally used three major programming strategies in competing against each other. The first is blunting, whereby each of the three networks program the same genre of program. The second is counterprogramming, whereby each network programs a different genre of program against the others. The third is what is termed in this study as hybrid programming, whereby two networks blunt while the third counterprograms. This study seeks to determine which of these three strategies provides the largest overall total prime time viewing audience across the three networks.

Ratings data for prime time programming over a ten year period were collected from national totals prepared by the Arbitron Ratings Service. The data were then combined so as VI to produce an index for each half hour segment of prime time programming for each day of the week across the ratings months and years under study. The data were then coded as to the strategy used by the three networks. Then the data were subjected to regression analysis to determine which strategy produced the largest overall share of the total audience across the three networks.

The results showed that counterprogramming produced the largest overall total viewing audience across the three networks during the period under study, and produced directional results to suggest that these same results would hold true across the various demographic groups of which the total viewing audience consist. It was concluded that wide spread use of counterprogramming by network programmers would provide the largest total viewing audience during prime time and could possibly reduce or even eliminate the current erosion of the network prime time viewing audience.