TV's not dead!

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Gob
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Joined: Tue Apr 06, 2010 8:40 am

TV's not dead!

Post by Gob »

Remember all those stories saying "TV is dead"? Google is full of them - about 232 million, according to its own calculation.

"TV is dead. Long live the internet," proclaimed a Guardian headline just a couple of months ago.

Yet what once seemed the conventional wisdom now looks premature at least - as Google's chairman Dr Eric Schmidt admitted at the weekend at the Edinburgh International Television Festival.

"In 2010, UK adults spent as much time watching TV in four days as they did using the web in a month," he said in his keynote McTaggart Lecture. "TV is still clearly winning the competition for attention!"

A Deloitte analysis for the festival reported that TV viewing had risen every year since 2006. In May 2011, it said, total television viewing was up by 6% year on year, an increase of 364 million hours.

"To put this rather large number in perspective," said the report, "it is equivalent to double the time the UK spent on Facebook, Linked In and Twitter in the same month. Not too shabby for a medium that has been, and continues to be, prophesied to disappear."

The chair of the Television Festival, George Entwistle, director of BBC Vision, said: "This year we've seen enormously resilient audience figures for traditionally scheduled TV experiences - from the Royal Wedding and Saturday night blockbuster entertainment to a resurgence in high quality drama from the big broadcasters."

People are also buying more - and bigger - TV sets, according to TV Licensing, with more than two million 40-inch-plus sets sold last year.

Far from being killed by the internet, television viewing has never been more popular. Some in the industry claim TV is now set to be the dominant partner, creatively at least.

John McVey, director of the producers' association PACT, said internet companies were crying out for top quality television content to feed the demands of its audience.

YouTube (owned by Google) is one. Created on the back of "user generated content", with millions of ordinary people sharing their video clips, the company now has a director whose job is to build its partnerships with broadcasters and other professional content providers.

In a session called The Battle for the Living Room, Ben McOwen-Wilson said a major priority for YouTube this year was to bring more "high-end" content onto the platform by offering to split advertising revenue with broadcasters and independent producers.

Channel 4 was the first broadcaster in the world to put its full catch-up service on YouTube.

Another priority, McOwen-Wilson said, was to make it easier for people to watch YouTube on the television screen - a further example of how TV and the internet need each other.


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“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”

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loCAtek
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Joined: Tue Apr 06, 2010 9:49 pm
Location: My San Ho'metown

Re: TV's not dead!

Post by loCAtek »

Classic Sesame Street;
...not dead.

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