TV to Periscope 80 years later. Our views still matter.
- Jul 7, 2016
- 4 min read
Today is the 80 year anniversary of the airing of the world's first television program. What will the next 80 years of television look like? Will there even be another 80 years of television as we know it? User validated live streaming may just be the future. To explore this, our Better Caribbean Program has been experimenting with Periscope in all we do.
There are two signs which are confirming that future - 1.Periscope now allows us to save all of our broadcasts, rather than auto-deletion after 24 hours requiring the transfer to Youtube as we have in the past. 2. Most major television shows now have Periscope accounts.
In order to understand the future we must understand the history (Tired of reading? Bring your eyes here.)
The first television program aired eighty years ago to 225 people with licenses from the Radio Corporation of America. This program was a mélange of content from dance ensembles to speeches to film clips. Within a month another step was taken to broadcast the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin to an audience of 150,000 in public viewing rooms in Germany. At this point the response of viewers was critical to the development of television broadcasting – we needed to be convinced to buy licenses. So broadcasts happened in defined physical spaces such as those rooms in Berlin.
Now do we even watch television in the same room…like together?
Now that television broadcasting has progressed and has become more globalized, the relationship between program creators, broadcasters and audiences has been stretched and for some it has become strained. Now for program creators to find out how their audience responds to their content, complex analytics must be extracted. This analysis is validated by the corporate support which interjects programs now in the form of a plethora of advertisements.
As a scientist I am suspicious of this kind of analysis because it is known that you can create statistics to say whatever you want to say. Isn’t it in the interest of the broadcasting companies to say that they are effective?
Who is paying for this analysis?
The advent of advertisements allows a more transparent tool to evaluate user response through evaluating consumer choices following these advertisements. However because of the multiple factors which also influence consumer choices – many companies let themselves off of the hook from evaluating how and whether their advertisements are working.
Again, I am suspicious of this - if scientists can piece together an understanding of an ocean ecosystem which has multiple factors, by exploring cause and effect factors one by one – why the mystery in the case of how broadcasting influences consumer choices? Perhaps we really don’t want to know exactly because that may require a re-evaluation of the validity of traditional advertising tools such as television. It is much easier (but yet not cost-effective) to continue to flood consumers with more and more advertisements whether it is working or not.
What happens when the advertisements seem so overwhelming that it drives consumers completely away from watching television?
When is the last time you started watching a television program and you forgot what you are watching. At least 25% of an hour long program includes advertisements (Luckerson, 2014). It seems as though we are going further away from the original intention of television broadcasting – audience validated programming. This shift may be a response to television broadcasting companies requiring more than licensing fees as income for their bottom line. It may be a response to the pirating of the license process. Regardless of the reason, advertisements are a staple in television broadcasting.
We can still consider advertisements as a kind of programming – programming our consumer choices but at the end of the day our consumption is our choice. So regardless of how companies and advertisers try to get it right with the most persuasive mix of messaging, music and heart-string pulling – they still need the validation from the consumer that it is working in the form of how we spend our money. Consumer and audience validation still matters. Our views still matter.
There is good news in regards to just how much it matters.
A shift is happening - away from our consumer choices being programmed by subliminal, invalidated and mystery box recipe advertisements.
A shift is happening - in favour of audience and consumer validation with the exponential growth of live-streaming apps. A prime example is Periscope.
Periscope’s live-streaming application is now the most autonomous form of social media which gives viewers control of their information with equal access to the ability to broadcast themselves. Users are able to make comments in real time – both text and simple hearts. Users are able to “teleport” and leave one person’s broadcast and head to another broadcast when they become bored with the content, without receiving forced advertising. This is not to say that businesses large and small are not using Periscope as an advertising tool, however the control rests more in the viewers’ hands (or eyes) about whose broadcast and whose products they want to view.
Yes, with traditional television broadcasting we can now flick through stations when we are bored with the content or advertisements but we never quite know what we will see when we change these stations. Periscope gives users a constantly updated snapshot of what is being aired on different accounts, so that users are able to view a sample of the live content before choosing that station.
Demise or Evolution?
Could Periscope lead to the demise of television or is it simply another iteration in the evolution of broadcasting technology – from radio to television to social media to live-streaming. All of these iterations of broadcasting technology co-exist and depend on each other but if we recognize the potential of Periscope (as has Twitter which bought Periscope before it launched) – we could see both a shift towards consumer/audience validated program viewing but towards a more conscious consumption of content. Could the world do with more conscious consumers? Certainly so.
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