After last year's report of declining viewership, Nielsen executives suggested larger cultural reasons for the trend.
His daily show, "Larry King Live," ended in 2010 amid declining viewership, and was replaced by "Piers Morgan Tonight" in early 2011.
On the surface, the planned changes to the Oscars appear intended to address the declining viewership of the telecast (which, this year, was at an all-time low).
But in a time of declining viewership, it means that the program's average rating for the season may tick up a tenth of a rating point or two.
The broadcast networks have managed declining viewership for years, but executives by and large said they believed that they had escaped the punishing losses that digital media exacted on the music industry and newspapers.
The once-thriving industry has been all but decimated by declining viewership and the cheaper production costs of alternative fare like "The Talk," a knock-off of "The View" that replaced "As the World Turns".
As declining viewership and cable subscriptions begin to take a toll on major media companies, players like Disney, Time Warner and Viacom are all dealing with varying degrees of shareholder concern about the future of their business models.
Steeply declining viewership in the late 2010s, however, led the academy to announce several changes to the ceremony's broadcast, which included a limit of three hours, beginning in 2019, and an earlier air date, beginning in 2020.
In its second year, a heavily promoted 3-D episode shown after the Super Bowl did not stave off a declining viewership (it averaged nearly 7.4 million for the season, but 6.11 million tuned in for the season finale), and by the spring, NBC was unsure if it would renew the show.
Pouring coffee in his Georgetown rowhouse, Tom Bettag, executive producer of "CBS Evening News" from 1986 to 1991 and now a producer for NBC News, recalled that the network's triumph at Tiananmen Square came on the heels of much-publicized budget cuts in the CBS news division, declining viewership and a series of astonishing stories involving Rather.
Linear TV viewing is declining: every major cable network (except NBC Sports) has declining viewership and aging viewers.
