Who knows what’s next for television?

28Jul08

Source: David Dale, Sydney Morning Herald

LAST week marked the end of Australia’s second age of television and the start of the third age. On Monday, Channel Ten farewelled Big Brother, and with it the notion that broadcast TV can save its own life by targeting viewers aged 16 to 39. On Wednesday, the ABC welcomed iView, and with it the notion that people who own computers need never use their TV sets again. Both hastened the doom of the networks as we know them.

The first age of television lasted from the mid-’50s to the mid-’80s, a period when the networks made and bought TV shows designed to appeal to everyone. The second age began when Channel Ten limited its audience to viewers aged 16 to 39, recognising that it could not compete with Nine and Seven for the mass market. The launch of Big Brother in 2001 was the pinnacle of this niche marketing.

But as the noughties proceeded, the 16 to 39s came to regard broadcast
television as a quaint anachronism. There were too many other things to
do. Big Brother didn’t fail because Kyle Sandilands is embarrassing and
Jackie O is pathetic. It was just a victim of social change.

The 16 to 39s are the lost demographic. They will never again commit
to, enthuse about or identify with any program crafted specifically for
them. They may switch on the box, but they’ll usually be doing
something else at the same time – texting, MSNing, surfing the web or
making their own programs for Myface, bookYou or spaCetube. And they
won’t stop doing all those things when they pass 40.

On Wednesday, the ABC demonstrated it has a better understanding of
social change than the commercial networks. It launched a website on
which anybody with high-speed broadband can watch most of the programs
currently associated with the ABC, any time they like, with the
capacity to pause, rewind and fast forward. The ABC’s boss, Mark Scott,
acknowledged that fewer than half of Australian households have the
broadband speed that will show iView at its best. But he pointed out
that when the ABC launched radio 2BL in the 1930s, less than 10 per
cent of Sydney people had suitable wireless receivers, and when ABC
television started in 1956, less than 5 per cent had TV sets. The
principle is: if you build it, they will come. In its first 24 hours,
iView was visited by 58,000 people.

My experience of it has been disappointing: I couldn’t find Spicks And
Specks on its menu, and when I clicked on the Pompeii episode of Doctor
Who I’d missed two weeks ago, the image was blurry and the voices out
of sync. But there were worse glitches in the early days of radio and
television.

The key question is: will the commercial networks react to this by
starting their own iViews, or will they go quietly into that dark night
that is less than a decade away?

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