One of the items I wanted to post on a couple weeks back but never got a chance to was this news from CBS about their rising ratings...

"The CBS audience was up in the first half of the season. It is certainly not an easy time. It is a time when viewers have many options, but it can be done," Nina Tassler, president of entertainment at CBS, said at the network's midseason presentation for TV critics.

...

CBS had nine of the top 20 top prime-time shows last week, including detective series "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation," the sitcom "Two and a Half Men" and the most popular new drama, "The Mentalist," according to Nielsen Media Research.

Now for those who don't know CBS is already the #1 television network in ratings (at least in total viewers) so this means their percentage got that much bigger. 

The problem I have with that is CBS has drastically cut it's Internet presence in the last year and a half.  The idea is basically this (taken from profy.com)...

In what seems like a step backward, CBS has now launched EyeLab, a service with a collection of short clips from several hit shows that air on the network. The videos will appear to be more along the lines of the user-generated content on YouTube, which CBS is hoping will keep viewers entertained and serve marketing purposes.

So what they are doing is putting up "clips" and "recaps" instead of full episodes.  I had known about this trend for a while but I didn't realize just how far they'd gone with it.  As of right now most of their shows aren't available online anymore.  Not on their site, not on Hulu, not on iTunes, nowhere.

Now, I really want to say this is an awful idea and there's some evidence to support that.  To give one example , I enjoy CBS' new show called "The Mentalist".  A couple Sundays ago they aired an episode which ran after a football game and the game went way short.  Which meant I only got half the episode on my DVR.  I went online to view the episode only to find it was no where to be found. 

To me this seems counterproductive.  You want viewers to be invested in your show which means you don't want them to miss an episode.   Which to me makes the case for putting your content online.

But if you've read this blog for any amount of time you know I judge by results and I can't deny the fact that CBS' results are positive.  Their ratings are up, I'd assume their expenses are down (since they are saving on bandwidth) and after almost 2 years it seems the strategy of ignoring online audiences seems to be working for them.

There is one golden caveat here and that's the fact that CBS is not #1 in the 18-49 demographic.  So you could argue they're audience is less inclined to use online sources because it skews older.  But CBS IS the #2 network in that demo so I'm not sure how much weight the theory holds.

All in all it's not a great news for people trying to get networks to put their stuff online.  Which is bad news for all of us.

Addendum: On a related note these types of articles aren't good either.  I've seen several "money saving" experts advising people to cancel their cable all together and just watch shows on the Internet.  If that starts happening en masse cable providers will be forced to pull their shows from the web.