Anyone with college-age kids who’ve been stuck at home over various parts of the pandemic needn’t review Nielsen’s latest Total Audience Report to know that TV-watching among that demographic is way down. Per Sportico:

In the third quarter of 2020, the 18-34 crowd averaged just 452 minutes of live TV viewing per week, which works out to about an hour and five minutes per day.

That marks a 23% drop compared to the year-ago period, when Millennials and their younger siblings at the far end of the Gen Z range averaged 583 minutes of TV consumption per week, and a 34% fall-off versus the third quarter of 2018 (684 minutes).

That’s a brutal drop off with wide-ranging implications but the bad news doesn’t stop there. Dive further into the time line and things look ugly AF:

Compared to the same three-month period five years ago, the time adults 18-34 spent in front of the tube last summer was down 77%, which means that young adults are now watching nearly 1,500 fewer minutes of TV than they did in 2015. In other words, the members of the population who are meant to succeed the people now aging out of the all-important 18-49 demo have slashed their TV consumption by what amounts to more than one entire day (24.9 hours.)

The conventional wisdom use to be that sports were immune to these dire trends. Well, maybe not:

That young adults are cutting way back on their use of live TV is a matter of considerable vexation for the sports world, which is scrambling to reach younger viewers across an atomized digital-media landscape.

Indeed recent data on consumer sentiment suggests many TV subscribers — including sports fans — are lost for good.

Which brings us to Diamond Sports Group….

TO READ MORE OF THIS ARTICLE, YOU MUST BE A PAYING SUBSCRIBER.