The Advent of New Media and The Challenges It Has Posed to Conventional Media

            The broadcasting business is all about selling audiences to advertisers other than cultivating the popular content of the program, broadcasters also realize that effective scheduling can be important in attracting wide audiences. And with the immense growth of satellite programming and cable, broadcasters of conventional television encountered the erosion of audience. NBC, CBS, and ABC accounted for almost ninety-two percent of all the viewers during the viewing at prime-time. The newer network and traditional colleagues seem to gain less sixty percent of the households and so. It can be said that the 3- network oligopoly which is decades old has given a direction to the unbridled competition’s new era (Taylor and Gibson 2017).

        In the political debate, the idea that a TV can change the culture has been quite prominent. The major problem is the threats against the efficiency of television programs. Threats is caused by unregulated television. Such situations are threats for diverse cultures as cultural values are different in different areas.     Furthermore, a common discussion for maintaining a public TV is about ensuring the delivery of high-quality and diverse programming that seems to cater to the overall population-to every culture and community. The new mode are introduced as a means or ways to access broadcast services using digital media, satellite, and iPhones. While the perception of the public about the significance together with the legitimacy of services of broadcasting founded on the spectrum scarcity's principle (Carey and Elton 2010).

        Moreover, from an ideological point of view, more and more questions were being formed about the notion of culture by the conservative critics and seem to charge that the broadcasting of public service was a closed, white-male, inbred, and elitist institutions were placed ahead by the liberal critics. It is reported by the Guardian newspaper that almost one-third of the viewers of television among teenagers were watching through on-demand services. This viewing was more than falling approximately by a quarter and they seemingly turn to Amazon, Netflix, and BBC iPlayer. This fall in the audience was most prominent among the teenagers and the decline was not that significant among the elder viewers (Stanley 2009). According to article published by theguardian.com teenagers would loss television shows and programs because of excessive trend of mobile and internet use. A BBC report, youngsters watch television shows at least 17 hours 37 minutes (as an average) per week. While on the other hand, these youngsters have all time opportunity to play games or use internet for other purposes. Moreover, research presents that almost 95% youngsters has opportunity to use internet.

        Teenagers seem to spend almost twenty percent of their time watching films while fourteen percent watched video clips on Hot star and YouTube. Films and fee-on demand television accounted for almost thirteen percent of their viewing with only six percent on Blue-Ray and DVD (Carey and Elton 2010).

    In terms of yearly changes, the quarter figure seems to represent a decline of almost one hour and forty-seven minutes weekly. It means teenagers decreased watching fifteen minutes on a weekly basis.

    The effectiveness and on-demand shows’ success created an important issue for the fifth channel. By lorry loads, it is losing viewers. In accordance with a survey conducted by Nelson, the viewers of Channel 5 have reached 998,000 from 1.038 million. During 2006 - 2007, the number was 1.075 and 1.29 million. It may not look as steep at it is but in comparison with its counterpart, Channel 8 has viewers 1.808 and 1.942 million in the same years (Dijck 2013).

    In addition, the movement towards an international economy was actually having an increasing effect on the way how policy-makers seemed to see TV products. The visibility of a free market of cultural and educational programming as effective commodities supported the discussions and arguments of critics that broadcasting of public service was no longer authorized or justified. It was simply an alteration to corporatization and deregulation from regulation. Facing dozens of spectres if not hundreds of new competitors, broadcasters have looked at the highly competitive world of goods and has accepted the jargon if not the brand management’s substance. Moreover, an editorial from the Cable and Broadcasting, the magazine of record claimed that branding is quite threatening to the supplant convergence or synergy as the TV buzzwords’ queen bee (Dijck 2013).

    Just for this objective, take BBC to the terrestrial broadcasting which is able to meet the remit of public service in the Act of Communication. Utilize BBC as it is a good and popular illustration of most of the news networks over the globe. It has a competent viewership since the twentieth century and in that era, ninety percent of the homes had a television in the United Kingdom. The channel showed a proper and good optimization in new productions and programmes based on news.

        Through the credibility of the channel in the production of news, good ratings were gained by BBC internationally. Additionally, the technology has also gone through immense improvements due to innovations since digital technology was presented into the film and media industry. In the starting of the twenty-first century, ninety-seven percent of the homes in England had Digital Televisions and the viewership had reached fifty-two mission and average watching time was two-hundred and forty minutes daily (Dijck 2013).

Measures: Accessing exclusive content is a tough bottleneck and also the source of power in the market. Evidence and cite why author says this. Particularly, premium events of sports along with the new releases of movies with no substitutes are important for the effective functioning of providers of Pay-tv. It also seems to affect the competition in other markets and for example, quadruple or triple play markets, the attractiveness of a certain package can be increased by content. An important concern is that a provider of downstream service might be capable of leveraging market position for gaining power for content in an upstream market (Tribe and Jana 2009).

    For addressing this issue, various nations imposed on the licensees of TV subscription an obligation for cross-carrying the content on the platform of another licensee in its unedited and unmodified form. Some specific challenges can be determined for acquiring the content by non-linear services of TV (such as Canal Sat/ TPS in France). Lastly, in some of the nations like Egypt, the exclusive content’s value has been decreased by piracy. With the presence of dominant broadcasters, new entrants have actually come up with different offers sufficient for convincing viewers in altering their present viewing patterns and channel choices. Furthermore, a commercial broadcaster with financed operations through fees of advertising must establish in a specific and short time period, a base of the audience that will be capable of attracting a sufficient number of advertisers and so on (Carey and Elton 2010).

    The aim of digital PR is to bring TV brands or shows online by creating a valuable and significant connection with a specific age group of brand influencers through offering optimized digital asset like magnetic content to them, such as links, videos, and news-related content, etc. that can be watched online through a single click. After all, the existence of an internet connection on any smart device such as mobile, tablet, and laptops can provide access to social media as a whole. On the other hand, developing a digital PR strategy that can be used together with the marketing campaign on social media is very helpful in expanding the reach of business or programs online (Tribe and Jana 2009).

    The series of watershed crises news events, from 2006 to 2010, allowed social media to be systematically used in journalism of BBC. The public broadcaster, at the same time, took more steps and developed more strategies within the newsroom so that social media could be combined in journalism of BBC along with on new platforms of social media such as Twitter and Facebook, etc.

        Coverage of so many crises news events of significance proved that more steps are taken by the broadcasters in order to integrate social media in journalism of BBC: The Mumbai attacks of 2008, the Myanmar Saffron Revolution of 2006, the Haiti earthquake of 2010, the Iranian elections of 2009 and so on. Adrienne Russell, as a communication scholar, stated that passive consumers are being replaced by networked publics together with news industry economics and digital tools that are changing the way by which journalism is circulated and discussed as well as produced (Dijck 2013).

        Few important examples and factors are that information has been readily available by social media, usually, information used to be broadcasted by traditional media on a one-to-many basis and organization or businesses responded to the one-to-one basis of the customer, but such communication way does not allow for any interaction or response. This has been changed by social media as it made enabled many-to-many, instead of one-to-one communications to take place within the industries and business. “Tele Shopping Network” (TSN) is one of the examples that a TV channel introduced by Disney-UTV India.

        Social media has made it possible to distribute the content to unlimited people. While traditional media such as television, magazines, newspapers, and radio have existed for several years, the playing field has changed by social media within the last couple of years. The spread of news or the content has enabled by social media within a few seconds that so without substantial costs involved. For example, “Fundraising some event” or organizing campaign for affected by floods or other “natural disaster” (Dijck 2013).

References of the Impact of New Media on Television

Bourdaa, M., J.P. Konsman, C. Sécail, and T. Venturini. 2015. “Does television reflect the evolution of scientific knowledge? The case of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder coverage on French television.” Public Understanding of Science 24 (2): 200-209.

Carey, John, and M. C. J. Elton. 2010. When Media are New: Understanding the Dynamics of New Media Adoption and Use. Digital Culture Books/University of Michigan Press and the University of Michigan Library.

Dijck, José van. 2013. The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media. OUP USA.

Edgerton, Gary R. 2009. The Columbia History of American Television. Columbia University Press.

Lotz, A.D. 2018. “Evolution or revolution? Television in transformation.” Critical Studies in Television 13 (4): 491-494.

Lotz, A.D. 2016. “The paradigmatic evolution of US television and the emergence of internet-distributed television.” Revista ICONO14 Revista científica de Comunicación y Tecnologías emergentes 14 (2): 122-142.

McLuhan, Marshall. 2016. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.

Stanley, Morgan. 2009. How Teenagers Consume Media: the report that shook the City. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2009/jul/13/teenage-media-habits-morgan-stanley.

Taylor, J, and L.K Gibson. 2017. “Digitisation, digital interaction and social media: embedded barriers to democratic heritage.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 23 (5): 408-420.

Tribe, Mark, and Reena Jana. 2009. New Media Art. Taschen.

Waldfogel, J. 2017. “The random long tail and the golden age of television.” Innovation Policy and the Economy 17 (1): 1-25.