Comment: Picture’s bright as ever for television despite growing challenge from social media giants

There’s no business like TV show business. I have just returned from Los Angeles, where the mood among television people is a lot more buoyant than in the movie industry.

While new big-budget films such as Ben-Hur and the Ghostbusters sequel have flopped amid fears that under-35s are shunning the cinema, the TV production industry is benefiting from an influx of cash.

Giant billboards for Netflix and Amazon Prime Instant Video shows such as The Get Down, Stranger Things and Goliath tower above the palm-tree-lined boulevards of Hollywood, signalling where the new money is coming from.

Netflix and Amazon are offering online streaming and on-demand binge viewing — not a linear transmission on a traditional broadcast channel but still TV, best viewed on a big screen, with the high production values and star talent that viewers demand.

It could not be more alien from the short-form, bubblegum-type clips that generate most of the video views on Snapchat, Facebook and YouTube, the social media giants that are trying to steal TV ad budgets.

Television remains the most engaging entertainment medium despite, and even because of, our addiction to smartphones. Mobile technology means we are watching more TV shows.

At the Warner Bros studios in Los Angeles, young fans are eager to visit the set of their favourite TV programmes such as The Big Bang Theory and Pretty Little Liars, even if they might binge-watch some of these online. TV viewing watched within seven days of live transmission has been remarkably resilient for the past decade — about three hours, 34 minutes a day in 2016 compared with three hours, 40 minutes in 2006, according to Thinkbox, the trade body for commercial TV in Britain.

Crucially, TV is also a lot more profitable than online, where Google and Facebook are sucking up virtually all the growth in advertising revenue. That’s why Vice Media co-founder Shane Smith is moving his youth-oriented online media company into TV with Viceland, which debuts in Britain next month. “It’s where brands want us to be,” says Smith, who tomorrow delivers the showpiece MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival, the most important annual event in the British TV industry calendar.

While he thinks Vice “should be on all screens” from mobile and tablet to on-demand, TV is still important. “Millennials are coming back to TV,” he claims. The logic behind this argument is that the internet has not killed TV — it has helped make TV available in more places, more of the time, and increase its appeal to a global audience.

Think of how the latest series of HBO’s Game of Thrones aired in almost 200 territories simultaneously, or how ITV has sold shows such as Young Victoria and Poldark to more than 100 countries.