“It is easier to measure audience acclaim now”
I feel that we are entering a new era in which the acclaim for a program is determined in a short time after airing and can be removed from broadcast. What I mean by this is; the television industry is dynamic to the utmost. A slip of the tongue by a host could receive enough feedback to remove the entire timeslot from the schedule before the program was concluded. Now the audience will diminish, because the content will improve and be richer in numbers. This is due to what we call fragmentation. As the number of the audience lessens, their value is improved accordingly. Comments of a single viewer will be seriously evaluated and regarded. Since rating reports are available during the program, and it can be removed from air even before the commercials begin, we are moving towards a brand new dynamic construct.
It is vital to explain what changes in ratings. Up until now, the rating system in the television industry was a simple and understandable construct. Certain subjects were chosen, and while their accuracy was in question, their approximate locations were known so especially in live broadcasts or programs in which ratings were significantly important, the broadcast was directed at those locations and the subjects were made sure to be on the air; so it was easy to “manipulate” ratings. I’m using quotations while saying manipulation, because this is not a serious manipulation, accusations about much more serious manipulations was thrown around. In this era, rating reports are instantaneous and based on real data. I tried an example of this while working for the Doğan Media Group. I realized that live data of channels were hard to obtain as the internet authority, so we devised software which recorded instant statistics for the broadcast over the internet. Thanks to this software the production director could monitor the fluctuations of ratings.
Two major discommodities occurred because of this. First; since the broadcast in question was television over the internet, the subjects didn’t have any distinctive characteristics other than being internet users, and we didn’t have personal information about them. This was a major issue. Second; some serious fluctuations were caused by technical problems on the side of the subject’s internet connection. It wasn’t always possible to perceive those technical problems. But apart from these, we could gain information about the fluctuations of viewers. This is a construct which will come to our view in a more serious way with IPTV. Severe format changes will be caused in instantaneous content production. Lately IPLAYER, an application by England’s BBC, integrated Facebook and Twitter while broadcasting so that it could receive customer feedback from these social networks. We are now able to change the television formats thanks to the feedback received from social networks. But since the subjects aren’t limited to a particular network in the IPTV system, these data will be much more significant and utilizable.
