0
Interview
13 September 2020 2.00 h

Elena Neira

Professor of audiovisual communication

”It’s all a battle for data and whoever wins it, gets the power”

In her book, Streaming Wars. La Nueva televisió, professor Elena Neira describes how television has changed in the past few years and how traditional companies and platforms are vying for viewers’ attention

Big data shows we’re similar and driven by standardised consumption habits We used to adapt to the media and now it’s the other way around
In this stream­ing war, is Net­flix the Em­pire? If so, who would be the Rebels of the au­dio­vi­sual galaxy?
Rather than the Em­pire, Net­flix is the dri­ving force be­hind a new model. It’s like when Doc Brown in Back to the Fu­ture goes back in time to get Marty. When he warns him that there isn’t enough road, the Doc replies: “Where we’re going we don’t need roads.” Net­flix was the first to be­lieve in the fly­ing De­lorean [the dig­i­tal busi­ness] and cre­ated a new way of un­der­stand­ing en­ter­tain­ment. It’s an em­pire in terms of mar­ket, as it has 180 mil­lion sub­scribers world­wide and is pre­sent in 190 coun­tries, but the stream­ing war has re­or­gan­ised in­ter­ests and re­ly­ing on third-party con­tent is hurt­ing it. Luck­ily it knew how to start its own pro­duc­tion. Dis­ney, Warner Media, HBO Max, Pea­cock al­ready have a lot of their own con­tent, but they don’t have mar­ket share and enough orig­i­nal con­tent. Apple is in an­other kind of busi­ness.
Who will sur­vive this war?
I’m not op­ti­mistic about more new plat­forms. Ei­ther they’re global or not prof­itable, with Filmin an ex­cep­tion be­cause it has a spe­cific niche. The fu­ture is in merg­ers of large cor­po­ra­tions and know­ing who will buy Net­flix.
Mean­while, it’s like a dream come true for film and se­ries fans.
The pos­i­tive thing is the wide array of on offer. In ad­di­tion, it gen­er­ates more con­sump­tion, often of high qual­ity, and gives the viewer a sense of em­pow­er­ment, con­trol­ling what they want to see at their own pace. It’s also an un­prece­dented tech­no­log­i­cal adap­ta­tion that al­lows us to ac­cess con­tent from any de­vice.
We’ve gone from the global in­ter­net vil­lage to being ship­wrecked on our dig­i­tal is­lands, the book says.
To­tally! But it’s funny how some plat­forms are mak­ing apps like Ama­zon’s Watch Party, where you can enjoy shared view­ing. It’s the con­cept of life TV ap­plied to fic­tion, the fic­tion we no longer watch on con­ven­tional TV but where we like to see the se­ries or the pro­gramme with an­other per­son. This sur­vives in the age of hyper-per­son­alised TV, the TV of the in­di­vid­ual, which has iso­lated us from the col­lec­tive ex­pe­ri­ence of watch­ing TV.
Net­flix has atom­ised the con­cept of clas­sic gen­res. It’s cat­e­gorised 80,000 al­go­rith­mi­cally-gen­er­ated mi­cro­gen­res and de­tected 2,000 taste com­mu­ni­ties.
It’s a mas­sive in­dex­ing of con­tent that has al­lowed them to de­tect the di­verse ap­proaches adopted by view­ers. For ex­am­ple, you may find House of Cards be­cause you like po­lit­i­cal drama, or be­cause you like fic­tion with em­pow­ered women. Net­flix saw that if it put the se­ries in a sin­gle genre it closed doors and in­stead it opened win­dows that in­crease the num­ber of views and pos­si­ble au­di­ences. They don’t care who you are, just what you like. What big data re­veals is that we’re sim­i­lar and dri­ven by stan­dard­ised con­sump­tion habits.
We look at screens con­tin­u­ously, but we know they are look­ing back at us. Are we in an episode of Black Mir­ror?
Of course! As I was say­ing, it’s a war for data. Busi­nesses re­alise that if the third par­ties [Net­flix] to whom they gave their con­tent learnt from the data from that con­tent, they can now bet­ter op­ti­mise what they make when it comes to pro­duc­ing it. Every­thing is a bat­tle for data. And who­ever has the data has the power. What these com­pa­nies do is build a data em­pire or as­pire to what Net­flix has been able to do.
“Every day we leave home with a portable TV in our pocket.” Our de­pen­dence on tech­nol­ogy is amaz­ing.
Com­fort is our new de­pen­dency. We used to adapt to the media and now it’s the other way around, the media adapts to our needs. This has led to a thresh­old of de­mand in which com­pa­nies know that if they don’t re­spond quickly the user will go else­where. We’ve gone from mo­nop­oly and rigid­ity to oli­gop­oly and flex­i­bil­ity. It’s also a kind of prison, a crys­tal palace that we’re locked up in. The plat­forms de­velop strate­gies with a sin­gle goal: to get us to spend as many hours on them as pos­si­ble. As in the Pla­tonic myth: only when we’re aware of the re­flec­tion will we be able to es­cape the cave, which means leav­ing our mo­bile phone at home.
Peo­ple no longer read, they just look at their mo­bile phones.
Sta­tis­ti­cally, mo­bile phone con­sump­tion is grow­ing and is ex­pected to reach 100 min­utes a day. The ex­pe­ri­ence is less struc­tured. I fol­low se­ries on my mo­bile, but you have to adapt to the con­text, to be pre­pared for con­stant in­ter­rup­tions. Usu­ally users pre­fer large screens and an in­ti­mate at­mos­phere to watch pro­grammes or se­ries that need more con­cen­tra­tion and use mo­biles for more in­for­mal con­tent.
When will a Spar­ta­cus ap­pear to set us slaves free?
That’s hard, es­pe­cially with new gen­er­a­tions grow­ing up in this al­go­rith­mic cul­ture. It’s all a mat­ter of ed­u­ca­tion and in­di­vid­ual free­dom, of un­der­stand­ing the side ef­fects and di­ver­si­fy­ing what’s on offer. If you allow the plat­forms to choose for you and don’t ex­er­cise any ac­tive choice, your crit­i­cal abil­ity will be af­fected.
Have we changed tele­vi­sion or has tele­vi­sion changed us?
It’s the chicken and egg de­bate. With our habits we give in­for­ma­tion to TV, and plat­forms know the con­tent they have to give us be­cause we give them the in­for­ma­tion. It’s an ex­er­cise in sys­tem-user feed­back.
Young peo­ple don’t watch con­ven­tional TV. Are they the col­lat­eral dam­age of war?
Con­ven­tional TV is not dead, not by a long shot. It’s con­sol­i­dat­ing gen­res that work for it, pro­grammes that gen­er­ate view­ers and a col­lec­tive ex­pe­ri­ence, such as Mas­terchef, La Voz, OT, sports broad­casts..., which have plenty of life in them. I wish they were more ver­sa­tile, that they’d use more in­for­ma­tive for­mu­las, and stop show­ing so much junk.

in­ter­view media

From ‘idiot box’ to ‘smart TV’

She belongs to the generation in which TV in the eighties acted as a babysitter and there were fights over the remote control. She has experienced the change from the idiot box to smart TV. Neira has a degree in law and audiovisual communication, but while studying she became hooked on The X-Files, and was turned into a hardened fan of TV series. She now teaches what she has learnt – audiovisual distribution models – at the UOC open university. She is a member of the GAME group at the university and a regular contributor to the Movistar + specials for the Emmys, Golden Globes and Oscars. She is the author of El espectador social and La otra pantalla and was in charge of the content for the Elite and The House of Flowers fan books. She recommends the series Normal People, on Starzplay.

Sign in. Sign in if you are already a verified reader. I want to become verified reader. To leave comments on the website you must be a verified reader.
Note: To leave comments on the website you must be a verified reader and accept the conditions of use.

Published on

Most Viewed