ARD, ZDF and a Revolution?

 For those who haven't really grasped public TV and commercial TV in Germany.....there is a fairly big difference.  

Most Germans...under the age of 30....aren't pro-public TV and will admit that they watch a marginal amount of public TV.  My son (German) will say that he's not watched a single minute for the past twenty years.  

N-TV did a fairly decent 'talk' over the public TV situation and where things are currently going. The new leadership at ARD....says it's time for some changes.  

Then this curious thing comes up.....if you just look at viewership....ZDF gets around 2.3-percent more viewership....than ARD.  

It's a puzzling thing.

For reference....ARD is a Hamburg organization, and almost all of their 'gang' lives in the Hamburg region.  ZDF?  Their gang is assigned in Mainz.  Does the locale of the networks matter in terms of quality or how management thinks?  Mainz....as cities go....is kind of a party-town (folks crack jokes....consume beer....and seem more playful).  Hamburg?  It's a Hanseatic-type place, where fashion, culture, money, and trends occur.  

So in this discussed revolution that ARD is talking about (they are the manager of the whole empire)....they want ZDF to be less focused on forum shows. More cop-shows?  Apparently.  

All of this 'change' business revolves around the idea that the public is fed up with public TV (in general) and they want 'something' else.  

But this comes back to what Verena Maria Dittrich commented via N-TV on this whole thing.  ZDF has this one particular series of show called Soko: X.  There's Soko: Munich, Soko: Vienna, Soko: Koln, and so on.  There must be a dozen of these, and they all revolve some fictional police operation going on in each city.  Yeah, it's kinda like CSI in a way.  

As Dittrich points out, there are a fair number of viewer (I would suggest over the age of 65), who get into this series, and maybe in some crazy way....the slight nod on numbers for ZDF....might lead back to this one series.

As for revolutionizing both ZDF and ARD....to gain back viewers in general?  You'd have to attract the under-30 crowd, and there's just not that type of creative nature to reset the whole audience.