Netflix streaming was down by up to 25% during the 2012 London Olympics. With Netflix beginning to create its own original content, are sports and live content ways that television will be able to stay ahead?
Staying new and relevant is so important to television programming. At this stage, Netflix and other online streaming services are comprised primarily of old content.
It is also important to remember that the coverage of the recent Olympic games in London was marked by controversy. Much of the outrage in Australia was channelled into the Facebook group Channel 9 Olympics Coverage sucks. Similar criticism was directed toward NBC in the United States for their coverage. The delaying of major events so they could be broadcast during primetime outraged many NBC viewers.
With this in mind, perhaps live content is better suited to online streaming. Will audiences be more satisfied if they are able to stream live content on demand? What will this mean for television?
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ReplyDeleteHey Sarah!
ReplyDeleteRead your post and thought I'd respond with some interesting information that has been unearthed post-Olympics in the UK, namely that the BBC's On-Demand streaming website broke all their previous records by a huge amount. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2012/sport-online-figures.html)
Paraphrasing the article, the foremost quote to be drawn from this success is from Phil Fearnley, General Manager - News and Knowledge, BBC Future Media, who said that, “Our aspiration was that just as the Coronation did for TV in 1953, the Olympics would do for digital in 2012. The demand and astonishing feedback we’ve seen from audiences accessing our Olympics content online, whenever they want, on the devices they choose, has exceeded our expectations and helped fulfil this aspiration".
Indeed, it is quite clear here that perhaps even the arena of Sports broadcast may not be safe from the advent of streaming.
Even so, Fox Sports recently signed the largest sports broadcast deal in Australian history with the NRL and they have mentioned numerous times that this will have a strong focus on online streaming and streamed content on-demand.
What I am suggesting here is that maybe the answer is broadcasters needing to have their fingers in both pies?
Some food for thought!