scte long read
few gigantic brands have done much to soften that particular blow and the public have raced ahead, its appetite for sexy, well designed, compatible tech and new generations of anything from handsets to electric cars to games consoles inexhaustible. Public setting the pace Because hardware is now cheaply available, formats wars are behind us and everything is online, the public is setting the pace; increasingly savvy Gen Z generations onwards do not know the world without the Internet; once again, as we have seen in other articles in Broadband Journal, it is the attitudes of generations that are affecting commercial and technical shifts, for better or worse. Gen Z have no attachment to the BBC or terrestrial programming; for them, there is no nostalgia for Doctor Who and Bagpuss; Antiques Roadshow and Songs of Praise isn’t aimed at them either. Linear TV in their home is about as relevant as owning a copy of the Yellow Pages.
up with Netflix, Amazon Prime, and particularly Disney, who brought forward the launch of their own platform during lockdown to capitalise on millions of cooped-up households. For advertisers and networks, what seemed an opportunity has become a significant problem. Fragmenting audiences have resulted in a number of unforeseen consequences. “The biggest failure is that the content providers, HBO, Disney, Paramount, saw the success of Netflix and wanted a bigger portion of that money. So they invested heavily into something of their own.” Natalie Colakides is a Technology, Media and Telecoms Research Analyst with S&P Global Intelligence and says the outcome has resulted in market saturation, poorer quality and more confusion. “There is less money to go around; and you can’t find content anymore without googling it on your phone. You have no idea what’s out there anymore.”
again, the Bluetooth speaker. We all remember people giving away their record collection in favour of CDs, only for those to become obsolete after 20 years. Men In Black was released in 1997 and Tommy Lee Jones’ character drily captured the mood: “I guess I’ll have to buy the White Album again.” Progress was consumer-led, because the hardware was expensive to replace, and CDs themselves were retailing as much as £16.99 on occasion, while costing record labels 13p per unit. There was a curious point from around 2005, when the beleaguered public had to juggle their Blackberry (no camera really and no internet access), digital SD cards of varying sizes for their cameras, printers that required CD Roms to install on their desktop computer, TomTom to stick on their dashboard and just to lighten things up, everyone gave each other digital photo frames that Christmas; how exciting, technology was the future! All these gadgets required their own unique chargers and there was no Amazon to fall back on if you lost one, and not a lot of online help available either. Innovation was plentiful if clunky and often bizarre; nothing talked to each other and anyone reading this will have a few lingering SD cards in drawers at home containing long forgotten photos they will never get to see.
Scaling back linear TV
The Radio Times seemed an anachronism even in the 80s, but we could do with something like that now, especially for the less technically literate. At the same time, linear TV channels, which older audiences depend on are reducing their output. Italy had 400 two years ago; it now has half that. ITV announced a slashing of budgets and a slew of redundancies in May, reducing running times of daytime favourites Lorraine, Loose Women and This Morning. While this affects the viewing pleasure of audiences, it also significantly affects the media production industry; presenter Kirsty Allsop bemoaned the short-sighted actions of ITV recently, telling The Media Show podcast, “We know that we live in an increasingly different TV universe. No one could ever have predicted 25 years ago that this would happen, and streaming has affected absolutely everything. But it’s desperately sad that these cuts have come to daytime because daytime is where people learn their craft, where producers and directors get their first chance, where new talent is discovered. It’s a gentler, easier place. And when the cuts hit that kind of television, it’s a bad time for all the legacy, terrestrial channels.” Reducing the output from terrestrial because of external pressures is understandable, but will affect the industry, as Kirsty points out, and audiences alike. IBC Chair Stephen Nuttall
Power of the internet
The Internet’s influence has affected everything from the software powering the hardware to fragmentation of audiences; world events like Covid have accelerated such fragmentation as other content providers like Paramount sought to keep
Globalisation, online retailers, cheap Chinese imports and the dominance of a
Sony Trinitron KV-4000KV
SEPTEMBER 2025 Volume 47 No.3
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