A Future for Television in Aotearoa?
If it has one, the future of television lies in live broadcasting.
The first proper piece I published on this new Disintermedia blog, back in September last year, made the point that TVNZ is no longer viable as a for-profit company. Since then, both TVNZ and TV3 - their one competitor in the free-to-air television market in this country - announced desperate measures to ensure their financial survival. They sacrificed the jobs of hundreds of journalists and support staff on the altar of corporate cost-cutting, as they axed some of their most popular live news and current affairs shows.
With datafarming tech corporations hoovering up the lion’s share of the global advertising market, which used to fund most free-to-air television, it’s become a cliche to say it’s a dying industry. But maybe that’s because the people trying to extract profits from television no longer know how to play to its strengths as a medium?
From its very early days, what distinguished television from film was live broadcasting. As time went on, and more and more prerecorded shows filled broadcasting schedules, this became easy to forget. But even these shows were often promoted as being “filmed before a live studio audience”. Indeed, until the VCR (Video Cassette Recorders) and VHS tapes became widely available in the 1980s, allowing audiences to “time-shift” programs for viewing at their convenience, television still retained a live event quality; you had to be there when it was on, or you missed it1.
Kiwis middle aged and older will remember televised national events called Telethons. TVNZ (and its predecessors) ran a Telethon every year or two from 1979 to 1991. TV3 had a turn in 1993, and years later, revived Telethon as a one-off in 2009. Could an internet equivalent create that same feeling of the whole country coming together over a weekend, to have fun and raise money for good causes?
“This is the final stages of the 1979 telethon,which raised $2,767,351 for the Year of the Child”, Trisha Dunleavy, Te Ara
The proliferation of net-connected devices has made time-shifting even easier, allowing us all to create our own personal viewing schedules. Digital native streaming services like NetFix are already soaking up most of the money television companies might have made by offering pre-recorded programs “on-demand”. If these companies want television to survive as a medium, you’d expect them to be moving away from being passive carriers of pre-recorded programs, and throwing the resources they have left into live broadcasting.
So it's frustrating to see the management of TVNZ, and the current owners of TV3, doing exactly the opposite. Some of the older media companies folded into Warner Discovery have their roots in the production of films and programs, so it's not as surprising to see them lean into pre-recorded content. It’s harder to understand what’s motivating the strategy at publicly-owned TVNZ.
But a television broadcaster that wants a future in the digital media age needs to be doing the opposite. The future of TV - if it has one - lies in live broadcasting.
It’s probably also in regionalised programming. Again, the older half of the population may remember regional programs like The Mainland Touch, which was broadcast live in Canterbury while similar programs were broadcast in other regions. It’s been so long since either of the national channels broadcast different things in different regions that most people have probably forgotten they can. But live video programming addressing local concerns, researched and presented by locals, is hard to find in the wilds of the net. It offers something digital streaming services can’t easily compete with.
As I said of TVNZ in that September piece;
If left to limp along as a for-profit, the few really useful things it still owns (free-to-air broadcast infrastructure, studios, etc) are at risk of neglect and asset stripping.
Now it’s looking like the same is true for TV3. If the country’s television infrastructure is to be preserved, the people in charge of it need to do some deep thinking about the medium they work in, and what it can do that the net can’t.
Images:
“Television - History of television in New Zealand”, by Trisha Dunleavy, Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, (accessed 30 May 2024).
A classic example; some of the earliest episodes of Doctor Who remain lost. They were produced to be broadcast, and maybe remembered, but not to be stored and watched again. The people managing the BBC at the time underestimated how fast the capacity of video storage technology would grow, but they also failed to anticipate how keen future generations would be to watch old programs.