Who Moved My Emmy Award?

If you and your friends are sitting together and talk about some TV shows you recently watch. It's a pretty good chance you're discussing Westworld, Game of Throne or House of Cards. Those are shows from popular HBO and Netflix, but try to recall when was the last time you heard people talk about a show from ABC or CBS. Or this, think about a time when you turn on your TV exactly at 9pm and sit through an entire hour even during commercial break just in order to catch the show on air?

We are living in a digital era, the glorious days for Broadcasting TV maybe behind us. But how did that happen and when? What we should expect in the future? We can imagine someday we'll cancel our cable and watch everything through online streaming, but are those day far away from us? To answer these questions, I researched Emmy Award winners and nominations for the past twenty years. Trying to have a glimpse of where our living rooms are heading. I used Python urllib and beautifulsoup to capture content from emmys.com/awards/nominees-winners. Then process and visualize my findings using pandas and numpy package.

Starting simple: the winners for Drama and Comedy Series

For comedy series (1997-2016), Broadcasting Network (e.g. CW, NBC, FOX, ABC, CBS, PBS) dominated this section for almost the entire two decades. The only competitor that steal a small portion of this award is HBO. It won outstanding comedy series three times at 2001 (Sex and The City), 2015 (Veep) and 2016 (Veep). Apart form HBO, Broadcasting community won the rest of 17 years, their advantage seems unshakable.

For drama (1997-2016), AMC made a big appearance through "Man Men" and "Breaking Bad", it won outstanding drama series six times. However the Broadcasting community is still the leader of this area, NBC, ABC and FOX combined have won 9 times during this period.

Let's dig deeper: All nominations are considered

Needless to say that AMC and HBO are great. But it didn't answer the question when it get started and where it's heading. So in addition to those 40 award winners, I included all shows that being nominated. From there we can see a bigger picture.

For the first ten years, the market has only two players: Broadcasting and Premium Cable (e.g HBO, Showtime, etc.). Clearly Premium Cable played the role of market follower. Up until ten years ago, the market started to shift and the advantage for Broadcasting network are shirking ever since. Not only Premium Cables steadily strengthened their market, we can also observe basic cable (e.g. AMC, USA, FX, etc.) and Internet companies (e.g. Amazon Video, Netflix, etc.) are catching up. In recent a few years, the cake is sliced fairly evenly between major competitors. But sad news for Broadcasting network because is their market are being eaten up.

A focus on Comedy: breakthrough for Internet Companies

If only concentrate on comedy, we can see the dominance of Broadcasting network is even bigger. Until 2011, they still had a sweep on nominations. However things are getting downhill pretty quickly. After the magnificent comeback on 2011, Broadcasting network lost their advantage very fast. One reason being the Premium Cable are still competitive, another reason is Internet Companies like Amazon Video and Netflix find their rhythm and grabbed themselves a seat at the table. While Internet comedy series are blooming and Premium Cable maintains their position, it forces Broadcasting network have to develop new strategies to stay in the game.

Summary

We are in the middle of a huge climate shift. It's always nice to take a step back and look at where are we. The landscape of TV production is changing, eventually it'll change your living room layout and monthly bill. We'll wait and see.

One more thing...

I'll do more research and analysis to breakdown some detail in the future such as how actor/actress, directing and writing affected the award. If interested, please stay toned. All data are collected courtesy of emmys.com/awards/nominees-winners.