This Week In Audience: Should The Oscars Be Worried About Shrinking Audiences?

This Week’s Insights: Some surprising benefits of arts field trips… Replacing tech engagement with people engagement… Why most people still stream Netflix on their TVs… Why are the Oscars losing audiences?

1. Obvious 101 – Arts Education Matters: Sometimes school arts field trips can look like they’re little more than rote experiences. But one recent study suggests some dramatic impacts. “The surprising result is that students who received multiple field trips experienced significantly greater gains on their standardized test scores after the first year than did the control students.” That translates into the equivalent of 87 additional days of traditional studies.
2. Museums Are Besotted By Tech Toys. Meanwhile At The Barnes… The museum has replaced tech engagement with people engagement. The Art Teams hang out in the galleries and engage with visitors about the art. “It’s not about technology. It’s not about providing people with a thing or device. It’s thinking about what human interaction should be in the galleries and what we want that to be and trying to get that right before layering in other things.”
3. Online Sure, Says Netflix, But TV Still Rules: The streaming service reports that 70 percent of its offerings are viewed on TVs rather than other devices. While pay TV integrations are making it easier to buy a Netflix subscription from your couch, in most cases it will still be easier to do it from a PC, which accounts for 40 percent of signups. Phones account for another 30 percent.
4. Oscars Get Their Lowest TV Ratings Ever: The live show was broadcast by ABC and it attracted an average of 26.5 million viewers according to Nielsen, a 20 percent decline on last year’s 32.9 million. The previous record low was set in 2008 when 31.8 million viewers tuned in to watch Jon Stewart host the event. That year, Oscar chaos was narrowly avoided after an 11-week writers’ strike in Hollywood. Why? Ross Douthat: “The key problem for the Oscars is not, as Hollywood’s critics on the right sometimes suggest, that the movie industry’s liberal politics are dragging down both box office numbers and Oscar ratings — that the desire to preach is swamping the desire to entertain. There is a political problem, but it is secondary: The key issue for the academy is that the Hollywood system no longer produces enough of the kind of movies that a mass-audience awards spectacle requires.”
5. So Is Hollywood’s Audience Collapsing? Disney’s making pots of money with its franchise pictures. But few others are. “Whereas before Disney may have been the studio making more money at the box office than everyone else, they may end up as the only studio making anymoney at the box office. And that, in turn, will cause trickle-down effects throughout the industry. All the way down to movie theaters, many of which will have to close as a result. Looking forward from this point, I think the big movie theater chains are in trouble. They’ve known this for a while, which is why there has been so much consolidation.”

Image: Pixabay