Jimmy Kimmel is unsure late-night shows will still exist in 10 years, saying he believes networks won’t dig into their pockets much longer to finance the talk series because people can just watch it online.
“I don’t know if there will be any late-night television shows on network TV in 10 years. Maybe there’ll be one but there won’t be a lot of them,” the “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” host said on the “Politickin’” podcast.
He continued: “Maybe more significantly, the fact that people are easily able to watch your monologue online the next day, it really cancels out the need to watch it when it’s on the air and once people stop watching it when it’s on the air, networks are going to stop paying for it to be made.”
He added that a root cause of late-night shows ending could be that there’s simply too much to watch in the era of streaming.
“There’s a lot to watch and now people can watch anything at anytime, they’ve got all these streaming services,” Kimmel continued. “It used to be Johnny Carson was the only thing on at 11:30 p.m. and so everybody watched, and then David Letterman was on after Johnny so people watched those two shows but now they’re so many options.”
In the meantime, Kimmel will continue on with his hosting gig on “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” however, he shared that he won’t be signing on to host the Academy Awards next year, saying he’s in the need needs for a break.
“I just decided I didn’t want to deal with that this year. It was just too much last year,” Kimmel explained on the podcast. “You wind up pushing everything off ’til after the Oscars, and then you have to do everything you promised to do after the Oscars, after the Oscars.”