Having completed Project Brief 4, I know my research into media institutions has dominated this blog but I would like to leave you with some thoughts I recently encountered whilst researching the decline of institutionalised television both in this country and abroad. Sean Plott is a well known YouTuber and Twitch streamer and in a recent interview with Business Insider discussed one of the most important and lesser talked about reasons for the decline of television and why audiences are increasingly watching online content instead of the tube. The article can be found here: http://www.businessinsider.com.au/youtube-and-twitch-star-sean-plott-explains-why-television-is-doomed-2015-3?r=US&IR=T.
What is the reason? Real-time Data. Within the Information Technology world, RTD is one of the most important things going round. There is even technology used to track the cell phone traffic in your retail outlet to know what products are being looked at the most. In a world where we could pretty easily track down the exact location of a friend or family member with relative ease, television networks still rely on surveys for market research and even ratings as a whole. Ratings (as I said in my audio essay which you won’t find cause of copyright issues) drive advertising, drive the entire television economy and the data that is used to gather the ratings, surveys. Literally phone calls with people, polls, nothing even remotely real-time. That’s why we have so many shows that last one season because networks have to just guess at whether audiences like a show and produce a whole season of it just in case.
Plott is a Twitch streamer and of course, on Twitch you have live chat aside your videos and this allows him to adjust his content as the episode goes as audience tastes change. The audience can actually tell the content creator, live, that they do or don’t like what they’re doing and even YouTube’s comment system is more profoundly influential than anything that comes out of television surveys. The ratings surveys only tell you what the audiences watch, not what they think, what they want, what would make them happy. Online media is so much more diverse for this exact reason and according to plott, if television doesn’t start to wise up and become more like these online channels, they’re doomed.27