With Conan's exit, NBC chooses the past over the future

A brief but memorable era in television history will end this evening when NBC broadcasts the final episode of The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien just seven months into the host's run, before giving the aging late-night franchise back to O'Brien's predecessor, Jay Leno. Per terms of the settlement signed Thursday, NBC will pay O'Brien $32.5 million--essentially buying out the remaining 2.5 years of his guaranteed contract--and hand over another $12 million to square the contracts of the comedian's staff; beginning March 1, Leno will again host The Tonight Show following the spectacular flameout of the primetime variety series he launched in mid-September. NBC is blaming the fiasco on ratings, and there's no question The Tonight Show's viewership has waned since O'Brien took over last summer--from June through December, he averaged 2.8 million viewers, according to Nielsen. During Leno's last full season as host, The Tonight Show averaged 5 million viewers. The question is whether traditional broadcast ratings are still an accurate barometer of a program's relevance and cultural cachet--and that's where NBC's decision to bring back Leno is a huge mistake.

The Tonight Show's eroding ratings are above all the result of a digital world where on-demand and time-shifted content on cable, the web and mobile has forever altered how and when viewers consume content--a world where O'Brien, not Leno, is the people's choice. (Look no further than Facebook and Twitter for proof: Last week, The New York Times reported Twitter's search engine showed thousands of results for the hashtag #teamconan--i.e., users siding with O'Brien--while the opposing #teamjay turned up only a handful of mentions.) I have enormous admiration for O'Brien, but rarely did I tune in to The Tonight Show during its nightly first-run broadcast (at least not until all hell broke loose a few weeks back and the program once again attained must-see status). Instead, I checked out bits and pieces on Hulu the following day, and I suspect a lot of other Conan fans did the same. O'Brien has always attracted the kind of hip, tech-savvy audience that networks and their advertisers covet, and for those viewers, the concept of "appointment television" doesn't exist. They no longer schedule their lives around TV--they schedule TV around their lives, and consume it across multiple platforms. Ratings can't capture that.

Leno's return may buoy The Tonight Show's mainstream fortunes in the short term, but bringing him back is a Band-Aid solution--given the disastrous state of the NBC lineup, even Johnny Carson himself couldn't revive the franchise. In the meantime, NBC is further alienating a youth audience that's already abandoned network television in favor of rival entertainment platforms. NBC has done little to suggest it understands those platforms: You might remember that two years ago, Jeff Zucker--the same NBC Universal president and CEO at the center of the O'Brien/Leno debacle--declared "[Mobile content] is not that important" during a panel appearance at the World Economic Forum. But other media and entertainment executives recognize the future lies in embracing the possibilities that digital offers. In fact, 53 percent of media and entertainment executives believe the mobile platform will emerge as their primary source of revenue growth over the next three years according to global management consulting firm Accenture's Fourth Annual Global Content Study, published earlier this week. Among more than 100 senior leaders and decision-makers spanning broadcasting, publishing, film, portal, gaming and music, most told Accenture they believe a multi-platform approach to content distribution will optimize future revenue growth--despite the economic downturn, 69 percent said their companies increased spending in their digital supply chains in 2009 to more effectively deliver compelling content across multiple platforms.

Another study published this week even more conclusively documents the ongoing evolution of the television model: According to the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation, young people in the U.S. now view 25 fewer minutes of regularly-scheduled TV per day than they did five years ago, the first-ever decline reported over the course of the study--however, over the same period, total television consumption actually increased from 3 hours and 51 minutes to 4 hours and 29 minutes per day thanks to the rise in alternative, time-shifted viewing channels like mobile phones and portable media devices. So while it's true that ratings are down across the television landscape, it's also true that interest in the medium is stronger than ever--to survive, networks must leverage that demand across multiple platforms, a trick NBC seems unable or unwilling to learn. O'Brien was one of their last remaining hopes for nurturing an audience beyond the confines of the traditional schedule, and they blew it. Wherever he lands next, whether it's Fox, cable or even the web, let's hope his next employers have a sense of humor, as well as some common sense to go along with it. -Jason