Viewing outside the box - how television is changing

This was an excellent week for traditional broadcasting values in Ireland. From its live rolling coverage of the weekend's Easter Rising commemorations, through a range of quality documentaries and some pretty spectacular musical performances, RTE successfully achieved what TV at its best has always aimed for – being a shared window and a mirror for the society it serves. But what are the chances that this role will dwindle or even disappear in the not too distant future, as the ways in which we watch, enjoy and pay for our TV fundamentally change?

This week investment bank UBS warned that the "privileged position at the top of the TV guide" enjoyed by traditional European broadcasters may soon be lost, with companies such as Amazon, Apple and Google aiming to transform TV to an "app-based world". Sports rights have already been bought up at inflated prices by telecommunications companies and satellite services. Audience habits are changing, and traditional broadcasters risk being left in the slipstream.

We still have a largely settled idea of what television means, although it’s rarely articulated. We grew up with it, and so did our parents and in some cases our grandparents. Sure, there have been changes down the years, but most of us still have a screen in the corner of our living rooms on which we occasionally watch stuff we still call “programmes”. That’s television, isn’t it?

Maybe not for long. In the US, cord cutters – who decide they don’t need that cable subscription any more because they can get all the content they want online – are on the rise.

In the UK, less than half the TV watched by 16 to 24-year-olds is traditional live linear television. A new generation of YouTube stars has arisen without any assistance from traditional channels. And new, non-broadcasters – Amazon Prime, Vice News, Netflix – are producing many of the most talked-about shows on television, or whatever we should be calling it now.

Meanwhile, the whole multibillion-dollar superstructure of advertising revenue, subscription services and state subvention through licence fees starts looking a bit shaky. Is TV finally facing the technological disruption which has wreaked havoc in the music and newspaper industries over the past 15 years?

If you talk to TV executives, they will say viewing figures are holding up, and that traditional broadcast television remains the preferred entertainment choice of the majority of the population. They will acknowledge that the proportion of viewers watching via online TV players or recorded on DVRs is increasing all the time. At a push they will even concede that younger viewers are migrating in significant numbers to other platforms.

They are correct – up to a point. TV has not yet experienced the precipitous decline which hit the CD market at the turn of the century. Nor is it suffering the same collapse in advertising and sales which have gnawed at the newspaper business.

What is happening to television is more complex and less predictable than either of those.

The medium is being disrupted by new forms of online distribution. But it is also facing a flowering of new sources of high-quality content. Audiences, freed from the shackles of the old-fashioned linear schedules, are changing their habits and their tastes. And they are also producing their own content and sharing it with their own communities.

Sticking to old formats

Just as the LP and the printed newspaper stuck to a series of rules based on the physical limitations of vinyl and paper respectively, TV still adheres closely to formats established in its earliest years.

The sitcom, the soap, the news bulletin and the chatshow are all rooted in an era when television was live and rigidly linear. You switched on the box in the corner, and you watched one of a small number of channels divided into rigorous time slots – usually either an hour or 30 minutes. You either checked the schedule in your daily paper or weekly listings guide, or you had internalised the schedule (It's Thursday night. It's 7.30. It must be . . . Top of the Pops!).

Television was a narrow pipe controlled by a small number of broadcasters who deemed what was best to show you and when. The result, now remembered nostalgically in some quarters, was a powerful medium shared collectively and simultaneously by millions of viewers, the “flickering electronic hearth” of the nation.

Some changes arrived in the 1980s and 1990s. In theory, the recordable VHS liberated us from the tyranny of the programme scheduler. But what would later be called “timeshift viewing” remained a minority pursuit. Cable and satellite services offered first tens, then hundreds of additional channels, fragmenting the audience and diluting the collective experience.

Families got second, third and fourth TV sets for the kitchen, the bedroom and even the bathroom. Other forms of entertainment – video games, social media – competed for people’s attention.

In response, TV did what cinema had done when under threat – it got bigger. Screens stretched from the boxy old 4:3 ratio to a more cinematic 16:9. They got larger. And flatter. Add-ons such as surround-sound became popular. Gimmicks such as 3D were launched and duly discarded. As digital filming technology improved, TV dramas started looking more and more like movies.

Production companies began taking advantage of all this. American dramas became more expansive, with longer story arcs than the old standalone episodes.

Cable channels such as HBO began producing new genres of TV drama – richly textured with adult themes and morally ambiguous characters. Comedies such as The Larry Sanders Show and the prison drama Oz paved the way for a golden age of American TV drama: The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad and Madmen.

Increasingly, people picked up on these series after the fact, watching them on DVD boxsets, often in just a couple of sittings. Netflix, a mail-order DVD company which had disrupted the video store business in the US, turned around and disrupted itself by relaunching as an online video on demand business.

With domestic broadband speeds increasing, the appetite for online video soared. But not everyone wanted to pay for it.

“Watch every film or TV show ever made, including the latest releases!” runs the ad for a small shop in a south Dublin shopping centre. Business is quiet but steady. There are three items for sale – two types of set-top box and one wireless keyboard. A woman comes in for advice on getting a better wifi signal to the box in her bedroom. Another gets instructions on how to install the equipment.

Shops like this have popped up across the country in the past 18 months. Where previously you had to go online or through street market traders to find these boxes, they’ve now become more respectable. The retailers say the devices are simply PCs configured to work with television sets. What you do with them is none of their business, any more than it is PC World’s business what you do with the laptop they sell you.

They’re also careful to make a distinction between streaming, which they maintain is legal under a recent European directive, and downloading a programme or film to store locally, which is a clear breach of copyright.

However, the reality is that many users will download apps that allow them to search for and view streamed movies, programmes and sports events they would otherwise have to pay for.

You don't really need a dedicated box to do any of this. When the first episode of the new series of Game of Thrones is broadcast on Sky in a couple of weeks' time, there will be illegally downloaded versions of it available online within minutes, and it is easy to wirelessly stream those from your PC to your TV.

Hundreds of thousands of people in Ireland do this sort of thing every day. The reason more people don’t do it is probably due as much to the glitchy interfaces, irritating spam and variable quality of the streams as to any ethical or legal considerations.

Rushing to catch up

The popularity of these technologies, as well as of services such as Netflix, shows the increasing appetite for the immediacy and convenience which digital streaming provides. Anyone with a Netflix account, with its multiple user profiles, ability to pick up exactly where you left off on different devices, and easy-to-use search functions, can’t help but feel they’re stepping back in time when they pick up their clunky old TV remote.

Never mind that Netflix’s inventory (in Ireland at least) is rather limited – the user experience puts traditional TV services in the shade.

Sky, Virgin and the other TV subscription services are rushing to catch up. Broadcasters are another lap behind. Their business models and technical infrastructure are still geared to the world of linear schedules. Platforms such as the RTÉ Player remain characterised as "catch up", with the schedule still the primary focus.

At some point in the not too distant future, television will reach a tipping point where it becomes primarily on-demand and delivered over the internet. What happens then? The benign view is that new forms and formats will emerge that suit the different needs of the audience.

People will have more control and more choice over what they view and when they view it. Niches and specialist interests will be served better. The contrary view is that a battle is taking place between global corporations for control of telecommunications, internet services and platforms, and the winners won’t have much time for local quirks or individual voices.

The reality is likely to be a mixture of both the globalised and the local. Which actually might be not so much of a change at all.