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I applaud the general concept of the headline. It’s about time. Finally, New Zealanders have managed to drag themselves away, kicking and screaming from TV 1 after years and years and years of it seeming that no matter what new TV’s people bought, they managed to superglue their tuning knobs onto TV 1 within hours of taking delivery. Not unlike radio, where the ZB network until recently seemed to dominate every aspect of radio across the nation (and arguably still does with news and talk).
How accurate is this NZ on Air survey and what does it actually tell us?
Glasshouse surveyed 1,511 people aged over 15 by landline and internet in May/June this year. The survey was undertaken a few weeks later than usual to avoid anomalous media consumption during the Level 4 and 3 COVID-19 lockdown
Without getting into the nitty-gritty of the often raised “landline” and the “can we trust internet surveys?” questions, NZ on Air has published the report in its entirety on its web site including the questions asked and full details of the methodology.
Don’t pay any attention to what the MSM reports about this. Go and look it up for yourself and get the facts rather than somebody else’s opinion.
Very few of us will be surprised that more and more people are slipping away from regular TV for news and information and moving to on line direct streaming. You can instantly access whatever information you need and you can target exactly what you want to know about.
There are of course some fundamental dangers with doing that. You lose the editorial control of a balanced (don’t fall about laughing – not yet), well packaged presentation and of course if you use the Google search engine, and other social media platforms as the basis for getting your information, you risk your information being controlled by the algorithms and being anything but neutral. Having said that, you at least know what you’re getting – or at least some of it.
It could be argued that with MSM you also know what you’re getting in terms of political slant and whether that is a good or bad thing is a moot point.
Getting back to the survey, what it tells us and why mainstream TV has good reason to be concerned.
Since 2014, TV viewing has dropped from 83% to 61%.
During the same period, on line video viewing has risen from 30% to 60% and what the survey calls SVOD (which means: Watch a TV show or other video content on a NZ website/service such as Netflix, Lightbox, Neon, Spark Sport, Fan Pass, Disney+, Apple TV or NZ On Screen or Watch a TV show or other video content on an overseas website/service such as Netflix, Hulu, BBC iPlayer or Amazon Prime) has leapt from 6% in 2014 to a whopping 48% in 2020.
While the main networks in New Zealand have attempted to address the ever diminishing viewership problem by providing “on demand” programming, they have failed abysmally by simply not knowing what they’re doing.
Instead of providing a properly managed, user friendly environment, they’ve required “log in” details (which many of us are simply not interested in providing these days of internet security issues), their “on Demand” selections often leave much to be desired and transition ever so slowly to the viewing device, then to add insult to injury, they “crash” dreadful commercials over your viewing with no right to reject: That is not “on demand” viewing.
The days of tuning into the telly for an evening of viewing after dinner and One News are long gone. The networks need to wake up to the fact that they are becoming dinosaurs in a digital world and are being left way behind.
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