This weekend's "Barron's" had a cover story called "Don't Touch That Dial," that began this way: "Everyone from Nextflix and Google to Apple and Intel things the television industry looks ripe for the plucking. They're wrong."
While wool-hatted sophisticates are trumpeting their latest esoteric flash in the digital pan, the numbers say otherwise.
"Linear TV," according to Barron's "the traditional sort carried by cable and satellite providers," achieved record numbers this year. "In the U.S., advertisers bought a record $63 billion of TV time...and "cable and satellite took in $97 billion in subscription fees in 2012, or 44 times Netflix streaming revenue...All told, the TV ecosystem brought in a record $160 billion last year..."
(In comparison, according to "eMarketer" Digital spend in 2013 was $42 billion of which $4.4 billion was mobile spend. And surely most of that $42 billion was search.)
I guess about 150 years ago Mark Twain said, "there are lies, damn lies and statistics."
As usual, he had it right.
