From Broadcast to Broadband.
So, TIVO was launched in New Zealand this week. The offering though was pretty flat. Basically you needed a telecom broadband account before you could even start to fool yourself into thinking it would be a good investment. Without telecom, you wouldn’t have a programme guide. Without a programme guide, your viewing experience would be a nightmare. You may as well stick to Freeview.
All this buzz got me thinking of the future though and wondering what the broadcasting environment could look like one day. Is it possible, that sooner or later, people will think of what we now call ‘broadcast’ television as an entity that could not live without the life-blood of broadband internet? Broadcast in this context would almost cease to exist. It’s possible that one day there could be no ‘channels’ as we know them. In the place of channels would be content hubs; websites where audiences could go to satisfy their hunger for a particular style of entertainment which they would be able to view on demand.
Now, obviously this wouldn’t be achievable without major restructuring of broadcast funding models for production as well as distribution and also massive infrastructural development.
But let’s say those problems were resolvable, would that be a step forward for current affairs broadcasting, or a step backwards?
NZ is currently being fed a weird hybrid news bulletin. It’s not all pop news, but it’s not all serious quality news either: it’s qual-pop. And it doesn’t satisfy anyone.
The people who like hard news don’t like it because there’s too much soft news and the people who like soft news don’t like it because there’s too much hard news. But there isn’t enough audience out there to justify the production of two news bulletins, each pandering to it’s own news market, and so everyone gets a less than satisfactory news experience.
Maybe news is the exception.
News is always the exception.
And that’s the way it should be.
