LECTURE: TELEVISION, STREAMING + AUDIENCE FRAGMENTATION by Romano Lobato
We had our final guest lecturer this week! Ramon Lobato is a Media and Communications expert and gave us insider knowledge into the changing landscape of Television.
Titled ‘Television, Streaming and Audience Fragmentation’, Ramon explained that T.V is no longer a broadcast landscape.
Whilst most people in the room put up their hand when asked if they watched Netflix over broadcast, it was surprising to learn that the average Australian watches 2.7 hours of broadcast T.V per day, compared to only 0.5 for online T.V.
I also learnt the acronyms for various Video broadcasting methods:
SVOD = Streaming or Subscribing Video on Demand
TVOD = Transactional Video on Demand
AVOD = Audio/ Video on Demand
IPTV = Internet Protocol Television
With the changing landscape of video, Ramon asked if we thought this was good or bad. I answered in the lecture that it has positive and negatives. Just like the backlash with ‘Fake News’ on Facebook, it’s easy for services to think they are doing us a favour by recommending posts or T.V shows we might enjoy but it is also stopping us from expanding our choices and trying genres that Netflix may not think we like but in reality we do.
It’s easy to feel like we’re in this Media bubble and the dangers of this is that people can become lazy, un-opinionated and uncultured, however we are also enjoying content we like and receiving more of it whenever we want rather than waiting for when our favourite shows comes on at 8:30p.m and we have to sitting in front of the T.V or else we’ll miss it.
When we moved into our apartment my best friend and I debated if we should get a T.V for about five seconds. We both have laptops with Netflix accounts, we don’t watch anything live or broadcast on free to air and if we want news we can go online. We have no use for a T.V in our household and I assume many other don’t as well.
READING: TIM WU – “The Attention Merchants” – Introduction + Epilogue
I found this week’s reading really interesting personally but also as it relates to Project Brief 4! For the assignment, our group is looking at fandoms and how the audience of fandoms have changed over time. For my research I was looking at passive and active audiences or the shift in audience participation. For example, in the past people would have had only a few broadcasters and only one or two broadcasting devices in their home. They had no options to compare the information they were being fed so believed this to be true, compared to modern day where we have many varying opinions and everyone can be their own publisher. The reading this week spoke about the media propaganda used in both World Wars and how the theory of attention equalling revenue only really came into existence in the early 20th century.
I enjoyed Wu’s personifying of the media, calling large corporations and media companies ‘The Attention Merchants” kind of makes it feel like there’s someone to blame on our addiction to devices and the Internet. We give our attention to many things over the day and in turn we are also giving someone money or our date (as mentioned in previous readings).
“When we reach the end of our days, our life experience will equal what we have paid attention to, whether by choice or default.”
