The Decline of Traditional Television: Impact of Streaming and OTT Dominance

VALENCIA. We have lived for decades around a piece of furniture and, for fifteen years, since the Smartphone brought the Internet to the whole world, – until then the desktop computer was still a barrier for many users – the habits of consumption of information and fiction are completely changing all over the world. The biggest proof is the decline of traditional television.

The Barlovento report on spectator behavior in 2023 has brought striking data. The most important, the prime time of traditional television. Viewers who are glued to the screen between 10:15 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. in 2013 were 18.2 million. Last year, 13.6. A loss of a third in a decade.

It must be taken into account that all this occurs in a context in which the average age of the viewer has gone from 48 to 58 years in one of the countries that also ages the fastest in Europe. In the distribution of this audience, Antena 3 has young people from 13 to 24 years old and the mature ones, from 45 to 64, and those older than 65. Telecinco only wins in adults from 25 to 44 years old, leading in such disparate places. such as the Canary Islands and the Basque Country.

As for the most viewed broadcasts of the year, the top nine positions are taken by sports broadcasts. Tenth and eleventh go to Eurovision, but in the next eighteen places, up to 30, everything is sports except one Pass word (15), las Chimes (17), The Anthill (27), the electoral debate of 23J (28) and a news program on Antena 3 (29). All sports are from La1, except Mundialitofrom Telecinco, which is the 30 most viewed.

In recent decades, the dominance of the sport has always been overwhelming, but before you could see some series, such as Red Eagle, The one that is coming, Prince or some movie, like Mission Impossible.

The summary is simple. Television is a medium that is losing importance and its audience is becoming smaller and older. We must keep in mind that television shaped our society. The way we dressed, spoke, our social aspirations… a good part of our mentality was engendered by that monster. Obviously, it was fed back with the interests of the audience, just look at the evolution of the famous program Martian Chronicles To understand. TV was a reflection of society.

Looking ahead, the Barlovento dossier cited the Kantar report Media Trends & Predictions 2024. The multinational’s analysts are betting on streaming with advertising, which is funny, because it means the usual television through other media, but there is something more. Artificial Intelligence will emerge to change business models.

This is something that has been talked about even in the renewal of the NBA’s broadcast contracts. We are moving towards a model that can put a price on each minute of television. The idea is very juicy in order to be able to further refine advertising and its targets, but just as there will be talk of millionaire golden minutes, many contents will have a value close to zero. Something that enthusiasts who try to monetize the content they upload to YouTube already know well.

This is the juiciest part of everything we are discussing, because, as American screenwriters have already experienced, what is happening to entertainment with screens is a uberization on a large scale. OTTs conquer the market and, once positioned, with traditional operators barely surviving with a residual audience, they begin to push providers down. It is the miracle of Silicon Valley innovation and, quite simply, it is happening to us in all habits of life. In the media, the most worrying cracks are, for example, those that we can watch on BBC, the sacrosanct reference. And meanwhile, It turns out that the modernization was to end advertising and return to the chapter per week. Now in Catalonia, for example, there is an important informative and editorial plurality with La1, TV3, Telecinco, Antena 3 and La Sexta. If in ten years they end up buried by Netflix, Apple and Amazon, plurality will come from one place: Silicon Valley.

But the domination of the sector belongs to the OTTs. The most powerful is Netflix, which reaches 9.4 million homes and 21.6 million potential audiences in Spain. It is followed by Amazon, with 7.4 and 16.5, Disney, 4.4 and 9.9, and HBO, 4 and 8.8. To find something differentiated you have to go to tenth place, where filmin is, with 0.6 million homes and 1.1 potential audience, a considerable inequality.

The threat could not be clearer: more expensive television dominated by fewer power centers. Of course, on a soup of thousands or millions of cheap or amateur content offers for an extraordinary and unfathomable fragmentation of audiences. Similarly, on social networks the trend is also for the power of money to prevail with hybrid business models whose success is already being seen in X, where, in the best of cases, the spread of hate is encouraged, the boutade and, to compete with Tik Tok, silly videos.

Notorious is also the blow that the report gives to the Metaverse. The truth is that there is a lot of television content that, offered as Virtual Reality, can be interesting. For example, attending an interview sitting at the same table where it takes place may be worth the hassle of putting glasses on your head. Also, everything that has to do with sports. Seeing a replay of a goal in 3D from the point of view of the scorer can give a lot of value. However, as noted Zuckerbergthis will be long term.

We do not know what the future will bring, but it is clear that fiction is no longer in the hands of local operators, who have given up competing in this field with OTTs. We will see what else is falling from the traditional sector and what remains. We will also see if the Netflix, Apple TV and Amazon bubble is burst, if the traditional ones can successfully land in streaming and also play this game. It is not yet clear that there is an operator take-it-allbut if one thing is unequivocal, it is that TV is more expensive today.

2024-01-06 06:15:15
#television #dies