The Wonderful World of Television and the Internet
I was 21 when I received a letter from the Nielsen Company. I was one of the chosen few that had been selected to participate in the Nielsen rating system. Unfortunately, being young at the time I never responded. I look back now and wish that I had responded. I think that perhaps my taste in television might have been a deciding factor in keeping some of the science fiction shows I loved from being cancelled. The blog post The truth about TV ratings, online viewing and sci-fi shows by Craign Engler in January of 2011 was an attempt to explain the Nielsen rating system and why it is still relied on for networks decisions when it comes to cancelling or continuing certain television shows. However, after reading the full article, I found myself wondering if the Nielsen system might be a bit out of date and poorly constructed. In the article it states “Nielsen looks at a sample of households around the United States, and from that sample they make a statistical estimate about what everyone else is watching.” According to Wikipedia.org, “…in 2009 of the 114,500,000 U.S. television households only 25,000 total American households (0.02183% of the total) participated in the Nielsen daily metered system.” I do know that they use other methods of tracking views besides their metered systems, however to me .02183% of the total households sampled using this method is not by scientific standards a good sample size. Unfortunately the cited link on Wikipedia to that statistic is no longer available so I don’t know how accurate the information is. I went to www.nielsen.com to try to find the information that I was looking for but only found the following statement “We measure more than 40% of the world’s viewing behavior – hundreds of channels, thousands of programs, millions of viewers.” That statement left me wondering how much of the US’s viewing behavior is actually measured. It also seems amazing to me that at the time of this article written in 2011, Nielsen was just changing their tracking to include online and mobile device viewing as well. Considering that online content service providers like Hulu and Boxee had already been around for some time, Nielsen seems to have been a little late in changing their tracking strategies.
The rise of internet television content providers like Hulu and Boxee had a significant impact on my household at the time that they were struggling to structure their business models in television content distribution, a field that has a long history and is reluctant to change. (Braun, J.A.) Before discussing the impact that those businesses had on my household, I must explain the nature of my husband’s television viewing. When I first met him in 2005 he had a negative view of television content. He had gone for 3 years without a television and had only recently just purchased and began to watch television again. Television for some reason had garnered a reputation for providing content that was somehow considered less valuable than other media. It has been argued that the availability of television content in online file sharing sites could have been the key to this shift in the valuation of television. The argument assumes that the option to watch shows consecutively on-demand rather than only once a week, has had some effect on how people value television content. (Newman, 2011) Although my husband’s argument for his change in views of television as a whole was the availability of better content than he had previously been privy to, the idea of watching shows consecutively became a valued aspect of watching television as we began to experiment with internet content providers. In 2007, after our cable bill had risen to well over $250 per month, we decided that we didn’t want cable, and since we didn’t see much content that held our interest we decided to “cut the cord”. I called Comcast, our local cable company, and told them we didn’t want to pay for cable but still wanted our internet connection. When they asked me the reason for this I mistakenly told them it was because we were getting better content from online content providers through the use of our Xbox than what we were finding on cable. Less than two days after making this decision we started having issues with our internet connection that we hadn’t had before. Shows weren’t streaming well and sometimes dropped out altogether. We had been using these internet content providers such as Netflix previously to dropping our cable service on the same internet connection with no trouble up until then. I called Comcast numerous times to have the issue fixed but the issues kept happening. I suspected that Comcast was purposely interrupting our bandwidth usage in an attempt to drive us back to purchasing cable service. I can’t substantiate that accusation with any solid evidence, but I consider myself somewhat tech savvy, and there was no reason for our service to be dropping on a regular basis since Comcast kept telling me that they couldn’t see any issues with our internet service. We became so frustrated that we switched to ATT DSL internet access and miraculously were able to watch television content online with no interruptions. After having read Going over the top: Online television distribution as socio-technical system by Joshua Braun regarding the struggles of Hulu and Boxee in regards to cable service providers in the years 2007 to 2009, my suspicions of what had happened to us in 2007 seem less like a suspicion and more like a reality.
I have noticed that the act of dropping our cable television service did have an effect on how we watch television. We have become part of the catch-up viewing audience. We love to watch shows consecutively, and love being able to re-watch previous episodes prior to watching the most recent episode of a television show. Although we did cut the cord for 3 years, after those 3 years we began to realize that we were missing newer episodes of the shows that we had become interested in by viewing them only online. Since then, we have subscribed to ATT U-Verse cable television service which allows us to have a good balance between immediate content and past content. We can re-watch the previous episode to a series using internet content providers just before watching the latest episode being aired in real-time on the cable provider.
I believe that cable service providers should revise their business models to become online content providers paid for with a subscription. This would allow customers to log into their feed anywhere at any time and watch the shows broadcast in real-time. All they would need to do is alter the boxes they put into houses today to feed online content, or sell televisions with a modem built in that can connect to the internet. I feel that their reluctance to move in this direction has a direct link to the service area models in practice today. For as long as I can remember cable service has been divided into areas, much like telephone companies and electric companies, in an effort to keep one company from creating a monopoly on too large of an area. If they move to online streaming this would open their services to more competition since the choice would be in the hands of the consumer. If all of the content available on cable was offered to me as an internet service, I would have the option of choosing from more than just the 2 or 3 providers that I can only choose from now. In my neighborhood the only companies I can choose from are ATT U-Verse, Comcast, and Direct TV. If all of the service providers across the country were made available to me online, I would have a much better set of options to choose from. The first company to move in this direction will become the leader in television content provider services and I hope that one day this is the direction the industry will move, since I would directly benefit from the competition. The competition would serve to create better services and pricing for the end consumer.
Engler, C. (2011, January 20). The truth about TV ratings, online viewing and sci-fi shows. Blastr.
Braun, J.A. (Forthcoming.). Going over the top: Online television distribution as socio-techical system.Communication, Culture & Critique.
Newman, M. Z. (2012). Free TV: File-sharing and the value of television. Television & New Media 13(6), 463–479.
The rise of internet television content providers like Hulu and Boxee had a significant impact on my household at the time that they were struggling to structure their business models in television content distribution, a field that has a long history and is reluctant to change. (Braun, J.A.) Before discussing the impact that those businesses had on my household, I must explain the nature of my husband’s television viewing. When I first met him in 2005 he had a negative view of television content. He had gone for 3 years without a television and had only recently just purchased and began to watch television again. Television for some reason had garnered a reputation for providing content that was somehow considered less valuable than other media. It has been argued that the availability of television content in online file sharing sites could have been the key to this shift in the valuation of television. The argument assumes that the option to watch shows consecutively on-demand rather than only once a week, has had some effect on how people value television content. (Newman, 2011) Although my husband’s argument for his change in views of television as a whole was the availability of better content than he had previously been privy to, the idea of watching shows consecutively became a valued aspect of watching television as we began to experiment with internet content providers. In 2007, after our cable bill had risen to well over $250 per month, we decided that we didn’t want cable, and since we didn’t see much content that held our interest we decided to “cut the cord”. I called Comcast, our local cable company, and told them we didn’t want to pay for cable but still wanted our internet connection. When they asked me the reason for this I mistakenly told them it was because we were getting better content from online content providers through the use of our Xbox than what we were finding on cable. Less than two days after making this decision we started having issues with our internet connection that we hadn’t had before. Shows weren’t streaming well and sometimes dropped out altogether. We had been using these internet content providers such as Netflix previously to dropping our cable service on the same internet connection with no trouble up until then. I called Comcast numerous times to have the issue fixed but the issues kept happening. I suspected that Comcast was purposely interrupting our bandwidth usage in an attempt to drive us back to purchasing cable service. I can’t substantiate that accusation with any solid evidence, but I consider myself somewhat tech savvy, and there was no reason for our service to be dropping on a regular basis since Comcast kept telling me that they couldn’t see any issues with our internet service. We became so frustrated that we switched to ATT DSL internet access and miraculously were able to watch television content online with no interruptions. After having read Going over the top: Online television distribution as socio-technical system by Joshua Braun regarding the struggles of Hulu and Boxee in regards to cable service providers in the years 2007 to 2009, my suspicions of what had happened to us in 2007 seem less like a suspicion and more like a reality.
I have noticed that the act of dropping our cable television service did have an effect on how we watch television. We have become part of the catch-up viewing audience. We love to watch shows consecutively, and love being able to re-watch previous episodes prior to watching the most recent episode of a television show. Although we did cut the cord for 3 years, after those 3 years we began to realize that we were missing newer episodes of the shows that we had become interested in by viewing them only online. Since then, we have subscribed to ATT U-Verse cable television service which allows us to have a good balance between immediate content and past content. We can re-watch the previous episode to a series using internet content providers just before watching the latest episode being aired in real-time on the cable provider.
I believe that cable service providers should revise their business models to become online content providers paid for with a subscription. This would allow customers to log into their feed anywhere at any time and watch the shows broadcast in real-time. All they would need to do is alter the boxes they put into houses today to feed online content, or sell televisions with a modem built in that can connect to the internet. I feel that their reluctance to move in this direction has a direct link to the service area models in practice today. For as long as I can remember cable service has been divided into areas, much like telephone companies and electric companies, in an effort to keep one company from creating a monopoly on too large of an area. If they move to online streaming this would open their services to more competition since the choice would be in the hands of the consumer. If all of the content available on cable was offered to me as an internet service, I would have the option of choosing from more than just the 2 or 3 providers that I can only choose from now. In my neighborhood the only companies I can choose from are ATT U-Verse, Comcast, and Direct TV. If all of the service providers across the country were made available to me online, I would have a much better set of options to choose from. The first company to move in this direction will become the leader in television content provider services and I hope that one day this is the direction the industry will move, since I would directly benefit from the competition. The competition would serve to create better services and pricing for the end consumer.
Engler, C. (2011, January 20). The truth about TV ratings, online viewing and sci-fi shows. Blastr.
Braun, J.A. (Forthcoming.). Going over the top: Online television distribution as socio-techical system.Communication, Culture & Critique.
Newman, M. Z. (2012). Free TV: File-sharing and the value of television. Television & New Media 13(6), 463–479.
A few things to think about Shrink…
ReplyDeleteThis sample will give you a point of reference as we progress though the semester. You write well, but we can all write better.
This is a good first draft of an article. You do a great job combining research and personal experience. However, it all gets a bit complicated.
One way you could make it less complicated to read is by breaking it into smaller paragraphs. Giving each point its own section helps the reader follow your train of thought. It also helps you organize your train of thought.
You also talk more about your research than what your research says.
Unfortunately the cited link on Wikipedia to that statistic is no longer available so I don’t know how accurate the information is.
If the information is questionable, then it shouldn’t be in your work. The most important part of the article is the conclusion you reach from the research.
We will cover these ideas and more in the weeks ahead. Thank you for posting.