Category: Television

By Olivia Jennings

While sites such as Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime have changed the way that we define streaming now, none will compare to the original provider of video content on the internet: YouTube. Before TV was available online, people were making their own content to share online. Nowadays, Youtube has become a hodgepodge of every kind of video you could ever want. 

According to Business for Apps, there are 1.8 billion people registered with accounts on YouTube. Every hour, over 300 hours of video content is updated to the site, totaling up to the 1.3 billion videos available on the site as of 2018. Youtube pulls in 63 million viewers in one day watching over 1 billion hours of video in that day. This used to be all free, amateur content.

But, YouTube started introducing ads in 2008 which gave bloggers an opportunity to make money off of their videos. The more people who view your video, the more people view the ads, and the more money the vloggers made. However, YouTube did not start competing with streaming sites until it introduced YouTube Red, which is now called YouTube Premium.

YouTube premium offers, like Netflix, original, exclusive content. They also offer the content already found on YouTube without the ads, which plays back into the need for instant gratification that comes down to one thing: people hate ads. People will pay to not watch ads. YouTube Red also offers a musical aspect that Netflix and Hulu do not, since YouTube has musical aspects as well with its long-term partnership with Vevo. One of the best things that YouTube Premium offers is Background Play, which allows for music to play from YouTube even when doing other things on your device, which has been a big draw.

YouTube premium starts at 11.99/mo, which is a competitive rate with sites such as Netflix and Hulu. YouTube is an example of the evolution of media, as it is moving forward as trends change to adapt to what people want. As the online community has become more and more real, so has the content on these sites as people find careers and professional content on what used to be an amateur site.

But, how does the future of television change with the emergence of sites such as these? According to the FCC, these new streaming services are regulated the same way that satellite TV channels are regulated, showing that they are the future of television. These sites should be taken seriously, as cord cutting is becoming more and more common. In the UK, there are more households that subscribe to streaming services (9.78 Million) as opposed to households that have satellite (9.4 million). With so much content online, why would you limit yourself to what was on at a certain channel at a certain time?

Sources:

Why YouTube Premium Will Beat Apple Music

The Guardian

The FCC

YouTube Premium

By Olivia Jennings

Think back to the age of nine. You’re sitting in front of the television in your family room on a Saturday morning, since there is no way to watch your shows on any other devices. After fighting over the remote with your younger sibling, you have come out victorious and therefore get to pick the channel you both will watch. You get to your favorite channel and within two minutes BAM, you’re hit with a commercial break.

Image curtesy of MICHAEL & SUSAN DELL CENTER for HEALTHY LIVING

But now that has all changed. A large part of the appeal of Netflix has been its lack of advertisements and its large amount of content. Because of the decline of DVD sales, Netflix also moved online and began offering streaming series in 2008 without advertisements. Netflix’s competitors, such as Hulu (which is only offered in the United States) do offer commercial free viewing, but for a cost. Even YouTube, which traditionally was as free website in which users could upload and view videos, has started including advertisements in their popular, long videos, which has created a whole new market for advertisements.

According to Vivian, advertising is any paid form of non-personal presentation and promotion of ideas, goods, or services by an identified sponsor, with the purpose to inform, persuade, and remind the consumer of a product or a service. Advertisers pay to have their content available for viewers, which provides funding for the network or service in which the ad is found. This is a system that has been around since the beginning of modern television. Unlike Netflix’s original competitor Blockbuster (R.I.P), in which people came into the store without a membership and picked up a movie to rent, which they paid for individually. The online streaming service is what allowed for Netflix’s international expansion.

Netflix changed the game internationally when instead of seeking money from advertisements, they instead sought funding from their consumers by asking for a monthly fee, which included access to all of their content ad-free. In fact, at one point Netflix experimented with the idea of advertisements by including previews for their own original content. This began an uproar from consumers which caused Netflix CEO to send out “Calm down: no ads coming onto Netflix. Period. Just testing relevant trailers for other Netflix titles you may love”. People really seem passionate about no advertisements, since that is what they are paying for.

Image is curtesy of TechCrunch

There are different levels of Netflix memberships, but they have to do with streaming quality, not ad space. If you pay 12.99 a month as opposed to the traditional 7.99 a month, you can stream in HD as opposed to just average quality. However, most people I know have the 7.99 a month membership, so it seems that more people care about the lack of ads than the quality of the content. However, Netflix has been raising its prices, as the market has grown exponentially.

I believe that this structure may have helped with Netflix’s global growth more than it seems at first. You may be asking, why does matter in terms of globalization? It takes time and research to look into companies wanting to advertise on Netflix, which instead can be put towards content for the streaming site because of user funding. However, the result of this is a total importation of American culture to foreign countries, supporting the Cultural Imperialism Theory.

Sources:

Vivian

USA Today

Business of Apps

USA Today-Tweet

By Olivia Jennings

WHO’S WATCHING ANYWAY?

 

If I asked you what the one service was that could be found in almost every country across the world, what would you guess? Would you say somewhere to find food or a place to stay? You could guess that in every country you could find a cup of coffee or at least something to eat. What if I told you the one service that every country has in common is Netflix. Netflix is available in over 190 countries, and is only restricted by government regulations and is currently working on making an agreement with China. No matter where you go, you can access Netflix. So, with such a large audience, how does Netflix curate which shows are going to be available for streaming with such a diverse audience? While content does vary from country to country, there are unifying factors that make the content comparable across the board.

One of these is the demographic of viewers. Netflix hosted a grand total of 137.1 million subscribers last year, 57% of which come from outside the United States. According to statistics found in Business of Apps, more and more viewers are moving to streaming services, as 36% of people surveyed had a combination of streaming and satellite and 20% of people had only streaming services and no cable, a new trend as previously almost every household in the United States was considered to have a television. In fact, in the U.K. the  15.4 million subscribers surpassed the number of people who used cable television.

However, the most important thing to consider is that Netflix is the television source of the youth of the world. Over 50% of Netflix users are under the age of 35. In the article Rethinking International TV Flows Research in the Age of Netflix by Ramon Lobato, Netflix has changed the way that the demographic watches television. You no longer have to wait for your favorite show to come on once a week, you just have to wait for the release of a season and you can binge watch the 10+ hours of content in a day if you would like. This catalog-style of viewing pairs up with the iGen generation, as everything is about instant gratification, we want content and we want it now. we don’t want to wait or watch commercials. We want the content we are looking for immediately with no delays or distractions. The younger age demographic has called for a change in the way we stream, which has now spread to an international idea.

Sources: 

Business of Apps

Rethinking International TV Flows Research in the Age of Netflix

It’s Complicated