Content definitely would affect culture, but what matters more, is the medium.
Until this moment, it is still hard to say rather if the content really matters. Not that it is not important, but most of the time, the channel and platform seems to have more power than its content towards culture. Coined by Marshall McLuhan, “The medium is the message.”
There is a few jobs TV did (Ben Thomsan,2013):
• TV kept us informed
• TV provided educational content
• TV provided a live view of sporting events
• TV told stories
• TV offered escapism
It is clear that the first two job of getting informed and educated, and escapism are replaced by the Internet in the eye of the digital generation since internet not only replace but also do the job better than TV. A live view of sports event might be the last peace traditional TV still win, but as Snapchat or another live streaming platform(Twitter is now broadcasting live sports) is being more popular, the value of live view of a sport event on TV is diminishing. On storytelling, Netflix and other video streaming service are chasing up, and if they found a way to sustain their business model, replacing that job of the traditional TV is just a matter of time.
In this century where the people who own the most customer interface wins, traditional TV was doing a lot of jobs but was unbundled by the internet, where each new platform that serves each job TV was doing, are now doing much more better than TV could do.
Social media was the facilitate network who aggregate all the audience and unbundle the traditional ways of content, yet it was slightly different when it comes to TV broadcast or cable TV. The disruption of traditional TV view is mild and slow when it is compared with newspaper, magazine or music industry. Streaming video takes considerable bandwidth that most people lacked, the problem gets worst when there is more regulation that restricts and violate net neutrality. The result of ad-free on streaming services means to transfer the barrier of the cost of high-quality content to the audience.
The percentage of TV watching is still high but the number for Gen X and Gen Z who are almost or are born digital, are spending less time on traditional TV watch, but watch more television in a new television viewing style: subscription-based video through using a video streaming and delivery service. According to PwC, there is 3/5 household in the U.S. pay for a video streaming service.
Netflix disrupts all kinds of media platform it gets in touch with, from domestic US DVD rental business to on-demand entertainment, Netflix had is now having more than 79 million subscribers in 192 countries in just 20 years.
The way of viewing on Netflix fit the living habit of the young generation, put it in another way, it fit aligned with the living habit of the digital generation and their expectation towards media different from TV watching, ODE allows audience decide when and where they want to watch. It is commercial free, high quality, and sometimes sharable. Audience has more say on what to watch with these channels.
As the viewership of Netflix keeps on the increase, it benefits towards them since the data help them produce better and better content.
At first, Netflix recommends content based on the geographic location of the user. Meaning the page view by the audience in America will be different from that of UK since Netflix expect the two of them to prefer different recommendation and “push” due to the difference in culture and society.
But now, Netflix recommendation is solely based on past viewing behavior of that user. The reason why they did so, was due to that when they expend their service to a new location, it would cost a massive expense on crunch data for that location since they knew nothing about them previously. (Ben, 2016)As Netflix is expanding their territories continually and is gaining a more and larger audience basis, it would mean to cost less and more precise if they drop regional recommendation.
The change is good and is bad. The reason is that the algorithm may enable a better user experience as the display of content is more characterized and personalized. However, it also means that people will forever bound inside the circle and culture they originally begin with. They would feel that there is less content that violates their expectation or viewpoint. As a result, the agenda-setting on Netflix became a closed cycle where the audience will have less chance to encounter values or society they don’t know, disagreed to, or don’t know the importance of. In might be possible that in some way it goes against the theory of Spiral of Silence since there are so many spiral and the system separate them deliberately. People don’t have to silence themselves since they are forever bound inside the spiral they originally agreed to.
NBC earned a 14.9 rating and 26.7 million viewers in 2016’s Olympic game, but it was a drop from 4 years ago, where they had 17.5 rating and 31.3 million viewers for the same night in 2014. Less and less viewership makes advertisers leave the traditional TV. Who’s left? The large conglomerates (who might somehow also trying to find another place they can reach the younger audience with a similar cost they can pay for traditional TV platforms).
Matthew Gentzkow’s paper explained his findings on that television has generally been “bad,” socio-politically. The author tried to explain that the decline of people’s election on presidential election was due to TV watching, as the TV was taking away people’s attention and time they spend on other traditional printing media. His explanation was that people went to the TV for entertainment but not for political information.
TV tried hard to educate and provide knowledge to their audience, however, since they are losing revenue as advertiser leaving them, they rely more on a few large conglomerate to place an ad on them. Fewer advertisers with each of the larger proportion on investment mean they are more say on the TV programs. The audience would either be informed in a very narrowed information or neglect the political related information from TV. Need not to say they didn’t watch TV for the purpose of receiving political information.
The study on rather streaming video services would be beneficial towards the society socio-politically is still under discussion, but it is clear that compare to traditional TV, not only audience didn’t look for job that was done by traditional TV in live streaming video educational or informational on political related information, they focus and leverage their value against another platform on how good they are on storytelling.
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Gentzkow, M. (2006). Television and Voter Turnout. In The Quarterly Journal of Economics, August 2006.
McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York : McGraw-Hill.
Matrix, S. (2014). The Netflix effect: Teens, binge watching, and on-demand digital media trends. Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, 6(1), 119-138.
Popper,Ben.(2016).How Netflix completely revamped recommendations for its new global audience. Retrieved from https://www.theverge.com/2016/2/17/11030200/netflix-new-recommendation-system-global-regional
Thomson, Ben. (2013) Retrieved from https://stratechery.com/2013/the-jobs-tv-does/