 A thing of the past? (credit: Susan Lesch) In five years–though maybe not four months, as the Atlantic proposes–print editions of even the most venerable papers could join phone booths, video store late fees and Saturday mail delivery as quaint relics of the past. |
Nielsen ratings have been the industry standard measure of tv audiences since the Nielsen Company introduced their proprietary television market research service in 1950. Accordingly, advertisers and networks have used these numbers to gauge the success and failure of programming.
Now, as the technology to pinpoint audience sizes and different kinds of viewer engagement explodes, so has market research – and many new companies offering services each with their own take on what constitutes viewer engagement have begun to dot the industry landscape.
One such notable company is BlueFin Labs, founded in 2008, a product of MIT’s Media Lab. BlueFin measures audience engagement across social media to give a better snapshot of audience response to television shows. A video explaining their model is below, take a look to get a better idea of the big picture surrounding the new approach to understanding television audiences.
For the musicians of the Vegetable Orchestra, peppers make up horns, hollow pumpkins replace drum sets, and bound celery sticks resemble guitars. In an age when music is defined by its viral prevalence, The Vegetable Orchestra is literally going back to its roots.
The eleven-person orchestra records and performs all of its music by using fresh vegetables as instruments. Read More …
Publishing houses want readers to judge a book by its cover, not to mention colored endpapers and deckle edges, the Times’ Julie Bosman reported recently. Unfortunately, beleaguered newspapers cannot adapt this survival strategy.
Recently, the economics of print journalism have become more dire than traditional publishing. The reversal would have seemed ludicrous ten years ago, when newspapers still littered apartment lobbies, brownstone stoops and small-town sidewalks even as the umpteenth death knell was sounded for the novel and, less somberly, the hardcover non-fiction doorstop.
As major media and entertainment sites invest in original content, the cloud of niche programming and new shows available exclusively online is growing. While prominent sites like the Huffington Post, and the Daily Beast are all featuring new video content on their sites in a bid to establish themselves as serious players in the convergent media space, Netflix, Hulu, and others are making deals which will see exclusive, high-budget shows incorporated with their other offerings, almost all of which have to this point been sourced from studios or other independent content creators.
With these new investments comes not only an experiment, but a deluge of original scripted and non-scripted programming – and this isn’t only happening online. Throughout 2011 the cable industry saw an upsurge in original programming as channels sought to keep themselves relevant in an era when running re-runs is slowly becoming a less popular practice.
What does this mean for viewers? While it may become trickier to navigate the video and entertainment ecosystem, competition is greater than ever, and this means viewers may end up with more high quality programming that’s relevant to them.
At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, Youtube’s Robert Kyncl spoke on the company’s new approach to premium content. The future of premium internet video, a distribution pipeline which Kyncl says will take a 75% share of the total video market by 2020, Read More …
