A Former CBS Executive Suggests TV Schedulers Are Becoming Irrelevant. Is He Right?

deadline.com:

During a summer visit to Los Angeles this year, Jim McKairnes — a former senior vice president of planning for CBS who’s spent the past 13 years teaching TV history at the college level — had dinner with a fellow TV executive who shared concerns about the streaming world and how “viewers and the experience of watching and loving TV seemed to take a back seat to algorithms and optimizations.” Around the same time, news broke that Kevin Levy was stepping down from his role as EVP, program planning, scheduling and acquisitions at The CW.

That’s when it dawned on McKairnes that the role of a scheduler, “the crafting of a 22 hours a week, 35-weeks-a-season prime-time line-up worth jillions of dollars, just isn’t a thing anymore.” So McKairnes sat down and wrote a piece for Medium called Scheduling a TV Memoriam: An RIP Of Sorts for a Once-In-Demand Television Industry.

Along with offering a history lesson on how TV scheduling came to be, McKairnes said “[scheduling is] the word that’s slowly becoming irrelevant to the medium, having less and less meaning as television itself comes to mean more and more,” McKairnes wrote. “Broadcast television revenues still pivot on the whens and wheres of a primetime grid, but in this our streaming world they’re connected to so much more now.

As evidenced by Levy’s full former title, it’s about content strategy and acquisitions, too. In an era of digital windowing, Mondays at 9 is so last century.