Although not overly extensive nor excessive (my parents would tend to disagree), My TV watching patterns this semester have been filled with a lot of firsts. This semester marks my first experience with Netflix, my first relationship with The Bachelor, and the first time I used tenplay/catch-up. Upon review of my time-use diary, it almost seems as though my viewings were catered perfectly to this task and to the content of the TV Cultures course.
Outside of regular shows I would follow religiously, I used to watch TV mostly unintentionally – channel surfing, watching what was on for the sake of boredom. This usually meant endless Friends and Sex and the City reruns, the odd cooking show and the previous evening’s Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. However as life got busier, workloads increased and my monstrous social media obsession is taken into consideration, my televisual habits have become more precise and intentional.
This was my TV experience over the course of this semester:
Image via hiddenremote.com
Misfits (2009 – 2013) on Netflix
Following the persuasion by multiple friends and my recent subscription to Netflix, I began to watch and subsequently become addicted to the British science-fiction/comedy-drama, Misfits. Having originally aired on E4 in the UK, the comprehensive series was now available for viewing online. I strongly believed I had a non-addictive personality and had never binge-watched a series in my life. This changed very swiftly. I saw myself watching up to five 43-minute episodes in a sitting, accepting the autoplay function on Netflix to maintain episode-to-episode flow (as mentioned in lecture 3). This occurred on my laptop and via Apple TV on my actual television; in bed, in the lounge and at the dining room table.
Lectures 2 and 3 explored the way by which scheduling was once a means of control for broadcasters, and how it is is now controlled by audiences. Not only was I watching Misfits external to its original broadcast, I was watching it 6 years later and several episodes at a time. I had full scheduling control. As reflected by Scott McQuire in Media City, we live in “an era in which media technologies have become ubiquitous, mobile and scalable, generating new possibilities for social interaction” (2008). Having such a strong connection to the show and the way by which I experienced it truly made me recognise the impact of technology in the broadcasting spectrum.
Image via hercampus.com
Scream Queens (2015 – present) on tenplay
Likewise to the way in which I watched Misfits, I had my first go at using Network Ten’s catch-up platform, tenplay. This was initially out of laziness, which then turned into convenience. Once again I was in control of when, where and how I could watch Scream Queens, a brand new slasher/thriller/comedy from the creators of Glee and American Horror Story.
Image via womansday.com.au
The Bachelor/ette (2013 – 2015) on Channel 10
My experience watching both The Bachelor and The Bachelorette over the course of the semester was more traditional in the sense that I watched the broadcast ‘live’ – ads, recaps and all. In the past I typically recorded such programs to my Foxtel iQ and watched it later so that I could fast-forward through the ads, but I was both too impatient and too active in the water-cooler conversation (aka multiple bachelor-centric group messages and twitter conversations) to wait and subsequently lag behind. This occurred for one to two hours every Wednesday and Thursday night.
As mentioned in the lecture on broadcasting, I understand how the 7:30pm primetime position held by The Bachelor “coincide[s] with particular supposed events in the life of the family” (Fiske 1982), that being during or immediately after dinner. In my household I watched The Bachelor alone, and would rush to finish dinner with my family in order to watch. I found that the reason I did not want to watch it simultaneously with dinner was that instead of a knife and fork in my hand, I would rather have my phone in their place in order to be active in the conversation surrounding each episode. It was apparent that the friends I was viewing ‘with’ were doing the same thing, whereby according to Melanie Ingrey, 74% of Australian viewers are dual screening just like us, with 26% going the extra mile by triple screening. Rather than interrupting my experience with the program, as Ingrey claims, it stood to “enhance and complement the main screen”. Multi-screening enabled my active participation of the show online as I simultaneously watched the program on my TV screen.
References:
Ellis, J. (1982). Visible Fictions. London: Routledge.
Ingrey, M. (2014). Triple-Screening: A New Phenomenon. [online] Nielsen. Available at: http://www.nielsen.com/au/en/insights/news/2014/triple-screening-a-new-phenomenon.html [Accessed 25 Oct. 2015].
McQuire, S. (2008). The Media City: media, architecture and urban space. London, UK: Sage. pp 146.
