In the 20th century, we have seen a massive growth in the entertainment industry. Its success peaked with the televised entertainment programs that made home entertainment a thing anyone can afford. At the end of the 20th century, the immense growth of the PC as a primary source of entertainment and information has been noticed. From the Y2K onward, the PC and the web have been taking over. We are here to discuss why this is happening and how it will influence the lives of modern men and women, as well as the business environment. TV had a major echo when it comes to the development of our culture and the development of our society, but all signals seem to imply that the time for TV to retire is near. Even if the numbers are close, the newer generations are showing less and less interest in TV as a source of entertainment.
Interactivity & Audience Inclusion
TV is a bit fixed, if you have standard cable that is. You have a bunch of channels with their program schedule, and you are forced to pick one and show up on time to view something that interests you. There is very little flexibility in all this. Also, ploughing through hundreds of channels hoping you’ll find something good to watch becomes exhausting after a while, and you end up flipping channels to entertain yourself. In the online environment you get instant access to the content that you want. Some of it is pay-to-view content while others are free. You also get access to free information and content on YouTube and other video platforms, access to information about anything and everything on Wikipedia, and so on and so on. If an online community is unanimous about something, they can pressure entertainers to provide them with the content they want. In the online environment, there is also a lot of space for user generated content. YouTube is filled with entertainment channels that people can tap into. Equals Three ran (and hosted, until recently) by Ray William Johnson is an example of this. DeviantArt is a great place for user generated design and art. SoundCloud, 9Gag, and the list goes off to infinity.
Marketing
Even though business budgets for TV marketing are still bigger than for online marketing, its position has become solidified. The wide pallet of online marketing methods presents businesses with various approaches to achieve different marketing goals. It also enables them to target their audience with unsurpassed precision, therefore enabling them to get a bigger conversion rate. The whole process of finding the right target audience is also streamlined and made more precise. You actually get valid analytics from your marketing if you play your cards right. This provides an average business with the level of info parallel to that of big corporate entrepreneurships at a fraction of the price. TV, on the other hand, has a big auditorium but it is slowly declining as the number of Web users keeps increasing. It also doesn’t provide you with any information about the success rate of your ads, making investing into TV ads a bigger risk than investing in online marketing. If your marketing effort goes south in the online environment, you will know that it happened and why it happened (you get user feedback) while the televised version yields no such information without significant effort.
The Advantages of Digitalization
Even TV is online and broadcasts things that were incited in the online environment. They need to keep up with the Web in order to remain relevant and get public opinion on things. Still, they can hardly find the time to do it all, especially when we take into consideration that TVs are far inferior to PCs, as a device. The TV environment is getting increasingly drawn into the digital environment with BBC recently switching to file based delivery, this can’t be more apparent.
As a final note, I leave you with this. The online environment is a blend of the media that has been popular in the past while providing the auditorium a chance to take part in the entire thing and publicly share their opinion, and THIS is only the tip of the iceberg.