Worldwide legacy broadcasters should embrace TV programmers that cater to both Gen Z and Boomer viewers, so that broadcast TV can compete with smartphones and YouTube.
Here’s an enigma inside a riddle, or better yet, a catch-22: How can you get elusive young viewers (those who text while crossing a busy road, or obsessively watch YouTube) to tune in to legacy broadcast television without losing the reliable old viewers (those who still use business cards and “dumb” flip phones)?
Let’s review the historical facts. Older viewers were gradually introduced to the telephone, then the television, and finally the Internet. It was a slow but sure familiarization process. They didn’t grow up with all of them at once.
Meanwhile, younger viewers were raised on smartphones, which are part telephone, part television, part camera, part game console, and connected all the time. Despite this, according to an April 5, 2026 New York Times Magazine article, “many young people feel fed up with their phones.”
Even though the Internet was created for the U.S. military in 1969, it only became popular in the 1990s after the introduction of web browsers. E-mail entered the picture in 1971, but wasn’t widely used until the late 1990s. Indeed, Time magazine named the personal computer its “Machine of the Year” in 1982.
The telephone was invented in 1871 by the Italian Antonio Meucci on Staten Island, New York, who called it “a speaking telegraph,” but it wasn’t popularized until 1876 by Scottish-born Alexander Graham Bell (although this was contested by the American Elisha Gray. Sadly, by that time, Meucci was out of the picture since he didn’t have the money to renew his patent).
Television was invented in the U.K. and the U.S. simultaneously in 1927 and popularized in the U.S. in 1949.
YouTube (now owned by Google) was introduced in 2005, and these days, Gen Z (those born between 1997 and 2012) prefer to consume content on YouTube more than any other media.
The smartphone made its debut in 2007 with the introduction of the iPhone, while cellular telephony (or the mobile phone) was invented in 1915, but not popularized until 1990. Wi-Fi (or wireless Internet) became popular in 1991.
According to the Pew Research Center, the number of American teenagers with access to a smartphone jumped from 23 percent to 37 percent between 2011 and 2012, and by 2024, 95 percent of young American adults (18 to 29 years of age) had smartphones.
In view of all of those developments, my opinion is that the worldwide legacy broadcast daytime schedule should be divided between Gen Z programmers and Baby Boomer programmers, each responsible for catering to their TV audiences’ tune-in times and TV-watching devices.
(By Dom Serafini)
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