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posted by janrinok on Thursday January 12 2017, @10:56AM   Printer-friendly
from the who-pays-the-licence? dept.

The BBC is abandoning linear exclusivity as it goes for broke to make the iPlayer a global Netflix rival. The corporation says it will throw entire series on to the on-demand streaming service before the first episode in a series is even broadcast on terrestrial TV.

Director-General Tony Hall will call for the BBC to "reinvent public broadcasting for a new generation in order to compete against giants such as Netflix and Amazon" this morning.

Hall has set two targets: double the number of visits to iPlayer and quadruple the time a user spends on the iPlayer site by 2020.

Established broadcasters have faced increasing pressure from OTT providers in recent years. Netflix spent more on content (buying and licensing it) than the BBC or HBO last year. Netflix made "binge watching" series cheap and easy – previously you'd need to buy an expensive box set, and those usually sold to fans.

But for the BBC to follow suit and dump entire series on the internet at once means surrendering one of its key advantages: its ability to create artificial scarcity. Withholding episodes creates "event TV" – a common cultural experience – and results in increased attention. As Enders Analysis points out, live viewing has fallen 19 per cent since 2010 as time-shifted viewing making up about 40 per cent of the decline. "Linear remains vital," the consultancy warns.

Is "event TV" still a thing for non-sports programming?


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  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday January 12 2017, @12:46PM

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Thursday January 12 2017, @12:46PM (#452923) Homepage Journal

    Is "event TV" still a thing for non-sports programming?

    Not for me. My only "event TV" source is currently a pair of rabbit ears that stay in a collapsed state roughly 360 days a year. I only extend them to catch live local weather when a storm system that looks like it might get tornadic is rolling in a few times a year. I really do not miss being at the mercy of what the chuckleheads decide should air when I want to watch something. At all.

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  • (Score: 2) by Pino P on Thursday January 12 2017, @03:40PM

    by Pino P (4721) on Thursday January 12 2017, @03:40PM (#452956) Journal

    I can think of a few other categories of programs on American TV with extremely short shelf life:

    • Certain game shows, such as Dancing with the Stars
    • Entertainment awards shows, such as Golden Globe, Grammy Awards, and Academy Awards
    • Political commentary, such as The Rachel Maddow Show
    • (Score: 3, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday January 12 2017, @05:44PM

      by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Thursday January 12 2017, @05:44PM (#452990) Journal

      I think for CERTAIN audiences and for CERTAIN shows (mostly very popular shows), there can still be a sense of "event TV" for people, especially those over 35 or 40 who grew up without necessarily using time-shifting all the time. (Yes, time-shifting has been easy since VCRs became popular in the 1980s, but it really boomed in the early 2000s or so with the introduction of TiVo and other more convenient video recorders.)

      I know plenty of folks who would be waiting for the next episode of Breaking Bad or Downton Abbey or Game of Thrones or whatever to show on TV, to take a few somewhat recent examples. (Yes, I know the first two have been off the air for a few years.) Regarding the BBC, it seems like Sherlock has had that sort of pull too, though audience fluctuations have been going down and up quite a bit.

      And even with time-shifting capabilities, that doesn't mean that there can't still be a sense of an "event" -- it's just often "smeared out" over a day or two. A lot of people watch stuff as it airs, but then you get a lot of folks who watch it as soon as they get a chance over the next 48 hours. It's pretty clear if you look at internet forums dealing with TV shows that there are significant groups of audiences just waiting for shows to go comment immediately. If you're commenting a week later because you time-shifted, you probably missed 97% of the conversation on the episode. (I don't participate in such forums, because I frankly don't watch a lot of TV, but for a few shows I've occasionally been interested in what people might be saying about it online... and I'm often rather surprised at how fast conversations swell and then die off. Even for "binge-watch" releases of entire seasons, if you haven't watched them all within a week, you may have missed the conversation.)

      So, while we probably have fewer and fewer cases of the family gathered around at 9:00pm on Thursday (or whatever) to watch a show, that doesn't mean there isn't SOME excitement or buzz generated around periodically releasing episodes, rather than dumping a season at once.

      Also, maybe this indicates my bias, I'd just like to note my ambivalence about the whole binge-watching phenomenon. Of course I've done it. But I've found that my perception and memory of TV shows has suffered for it. Not that most TV shows deserve a great deal of intellectual attention, but I think we process shows completely differently when they are spread out. We know how memory works -- sleep is essential to processing stuff each day, for example. We know that if you're trying to learn something new (like, say, playing the piano or learning a language), it's probably better to practice 10-15 minutes every day rather than spend several hours only once per month. For GOOD TV shows (and I know everyone will have a different opinion of what they think is "good," but for whatever YOU personally like), having a periodic engagement over weeks, months, or even years lets things "stew" in your brain a bit. Mysteries become more intense. Big reveals become more shocking. Do you really get the same experience binge-watching the entirety of an entire series over a week as you would seeing the gradual changes and shifts and drama unfold week-to-week over several years?

      I still recall a few shocking reveals on TV series I watched as a kid and how they made the whole experience compelling. But for series that I've binge-watched in the past few years, I can barely differentiate among the timeline of the show.... even though I KNOW some of them had extremely shocking things happen many times too. A final thought about this -- we used to serialize other stuff too. Like novels, which frequently were published in the 1800s and early 1900s in weekly or monthly segments in literary magazines. Again, I have a completely different experience when I think of books I've read gradually with a chapter or two each day vs. the "binge-reading" of a page turner where I finished the book in a day or two.

      Not to say that one experience is necessarily better than another. But they certainly are DIFFERENT.

      • (Score: 2) by Pino P on Thursday January 12 2017, @06:07PM

        by Pino P (4721) on Thursday January 12 2017, @06:07PM (#452996) Journal

        I think for CERTAIN audiences and for CERTAIN shows (mostly very popular shows), there can still be a sense of "event TV" for people, especially those over 35 or 40 who grew up without necessarily using time-shifting all the time.

        That and for people who stopped time-shifting when they discovered that unlike a $200 VCR, a TiVo DVR requires an "All In" subscription for $549.99 plus tax if you don't want it to suddenly stop working one day. That and during the switch to DVRs, expanded basic cable switched from analog in the clear to encrypted digital, and associating a DVR with a CableCARD was a hassle.

        It's pretty clear if you look at internet forums dealing with TV shows that there are significant groups of audiences just waiting for shows to go comment immediately. If you're commenting a week later because you time-shifted, you probably missed 97% of the conversation on the episode.

        A similar phenomenon occurs in discussions on SoylentNews and Slashdot, which see most of their traffic in the first three hours or so.