Piaras Kelly PR - Public Relations in Ireland

I recently wrote about the drawing power that television still retains despite the hype that it is a medium in decline. One of the examples I used to illustrate this was the fact that 70% of the Irish population recently tuned in to watch the Irish rugby team trounce England. One thing I wanted to mention was the fact that different content draws different kinds of audiences. One-off events like the recent rugby match can bring people together around a TV set. On the other hand shows like 24 and Lost work against television and are a driving force behind file-sharing and time-shift viewing.

It sounds like a bit of a strange statement, shows working against television. What I mean by that is content has become so complicated that by missing a single episode the viewer is lost when they tune in the following week. Take Heroes, one of the most popular shows in the States, as an example. In her weekly television review for the Irish Times, Fionola Meredith commented that “It’s clear that Heroes suffers from the contemporary curse of plotlines so stuffed with numerous complicated sub-narratives, obscure references and mysterious symbols that the whole fantastic edifice threatens to collapse under its own weight.“

Steven Johnson goes even further in an article for Wired:

You tell a friend that they simply have to start watching one of the new long-format dramas, like Heroes or The Wire. There’s no question of picking it up midseason. They’ve got to go back and start at the very beginning - using iTunes or BitTorrent or Netflix to catch up - or they’ll be utterly confused.

Think about that: At roughly 45 minutes an episode, that means viewers will readily invest two to three hours in a show just to get oriented. The story itself can stretch on for dozens of hours. (The Sopranos, for instance, should top out at nearly 75 hours when it ends this spring.) Television has always had serial narratives, but aside from soap operas, each episode was traditionally designed to stand on its own. A midseason hour of Kojak made perfect sense in isolation. But youd need CliffsNotes to follow a midseason installment of 24 cold.

It is utterly fascinating to watch television content driving the shift to video-on-demand, as television stations struggle to adapt their business models to cater for time-shifting audiences.

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