I recently read an article where one of the TV company CEO boasted about the achievements in the last year and how nothing has changed in TV’s world. His explanation of the new way people watch OTT media like Netflix, HBO or Disney was that people don’t use the TV time for those services but “another” time. They just spend more time on TV entertainment daily and traditional TV is fine. Here’s my take on that.
The TV has changed enormously over the last few years and mostly it’s because of social media I believe. The thing is that we parted our society into 3 groups: people who take information from TV, people who take information from the Internet and lastly people who read information from many sources in order to validate them against each other. That last group was very surprised when Trump was elected. It’s funny how the most educated group of people didn’t realise that if less than 20% of the society has higher education then over 50% of people go and vote for a person who promises exactly what they want to hear.
But back to TV – I don’t have one so it’s hard to judge what’s on there but I do have TV as a device and we do have Netflix (and recently Disney+). What I’ve noticed though as a viewer that we do watch mostly series or movies that are available. Very rarely we wait for anything. The availability of OTT media changed the market in my house and I believe in many other houses. Remember how you waited for a week for a new episode of anything? I don’t, it was so long ago that I can’t really imagine waiting for anything these days. Let alone the continuation of the same movie because of…
Ads! The last time I had a TV connected to free view was probably 5-6 years ago and in the end, I gave up watching it anyway because you just can’t stand the ads played in the middle of a movie. But that’s not all. Whenever I do have an opportunity to glimpse the public channel, I can see the same thing – the same ads, the same quality of cringy advertising that there was ten or twenty years ago. Nothing has changed. So when the CEO of TV channel tells me that nothing has changed in terms of their viewers’ ratings, I have very little hope for society.
So the market has changed for people with access to Netflix yet hasn’t changed for many people where the TV is in the main part of the lounge. And here’s the worse part. Media are and has been for a long time the real power of our society. We believe whatever they tell us on TV. Now with the internet and the social media we live in times we have more information than ever before yet we have the least availability to check whether that information is true! It’s crazy. Crooked Hillary was all over different TV channels and we don’t realise that TV has still a lot of power because in many places where they’re broadcasting there will be no Internet. And those TV channels repeated what they’ve learned from fake social media as we found out later.
So summarising Mr CEO nothing has changed but it has to. For everyone’s sake. The part of the society that reads from many sources stopped watching the traditional TV and doesn’t know what’s going on there anymore. But TV with the Internet has so much power of alternating our reality that it’s scary. Without a wider control of the information, we can be fed whatever any Mr CEO wants. And even though twenty percent of the most educated people will not believe in it, there’s still the majority that will vote for the “Make America Great Again” slogan. Something has to change!