Damien Venuto
Kiwi kids turning American
As a wounded Spark battles away in the streaming trench of its own making, a much bloodier fight brews in the Kiwi living room – and it could change the way our kids talk.
Data from broadcaster TVNZ, released this week, indicates that we’ve reached an important tipping point in the way viewers watch online content.
For the first time since records began, the broadcaster has noted that more people are now watching ondemand content through connected TVs than through desktops or mobile devices.
What this means is that the internet – and everything it offers – is now at the centre of the Kiwi living room, and there’ll be no turning back from this point.
This trend has been given a shot of adrenaline by the Rugby World Cup, which has left Kiwis with little choice but to get connected if they want to watch the games at home.
And the nation has responded to the change – albeit in the classic lastminute Kiwi way – with data from product comparison site PriceSpy showing that interest in television media players more than doubled in September, compared with the same month last year, as viewers scrambled to find out more about Google Chomecast devices and Apple TVs.
If Spark can take credit for getting one thing right, it’s ripping streaming away from just the early adopters and shoving it directly into middle New Zealand without asking permission. There have certainly been awkward moments for some of the technically challenged among us, but long after the mud dries on the knees of this year’s World Cup Winners, the TVs connected during the event will remain in the living room, blaring out on-demand content.
This change will give more New Zealanders access to a wider spread of content options than they’ve ever had before. But it also puts this country at the centre of what marketing academic Mark Ritson recently tipped to become “the bloodiest battle in marketing history”.
What Ritson is referring to is the fight for supremacy among the tech and media juggernauts all vying for control of the biggest screen in our everyday lives. Netflix, Apple, Amazon, Google, Disney and HBO are just some of the players spending a fortune to get viewers locked into their platforms.
Pitted against the billions of dollars Netflix or Apple have, local broadcasters face a challenge for relevance unlike anything they’ve seen since television emerged.
All this choice might seem great on the surface, but as more of our daily media minutes are shifted to international providers we’ll start to see a number of unintended consequences that could have a direct impact on Kiwi culture.
Cookies, diapers and candy
As far back as 2016, a study by Colmar Brunton found that 40 per cent of parents were concerned about the influence of American and international content on their kids.
“We have heard from lots of parents that they want their children to hear our stories. They also want to hear them in our accent and in our languages. It’s hugely important to parents,” TVNZ general manager of product and data Carmen Aitken tells the Herald.
Aitken says she still consistently hears from parents who are concerned about kids slipping Americanisms into their daily vernacular, from watching overseas content.
A unscientific poll among parents in the Herald newsroom found that words such as “cookies”, “candy”, “diapers” and “gas” have become common replacements for their predecessors : “biscuits”, “lollies”, “nappies” and “petrol”. And this is only set to increase, with YouTube steadily dominating screentime among younger viewers.
One way to look at this is that mimicry is a normal part of growing up and that children tend to parrot what they see in those around them.
Another way to look at it, however, is in terms of the power media have to influence how we behave. This is often referred to as “cultural currency”, and it plays a big role in terms of defining what we admire and who we look up to.
If Kiwi kids are predominantly fed narratives from abroad from a young age, what space does that leave for the local stories and colloquialisms that have been shaped over decades?
This is part of the reason why NZ On Air has invested heavily in programming on TVNZ’s ad-free children’s platform Heihei. The hope being that parents will choose the local option before venturing abroad.
The content watched by our tamariki is only part of the complexity we’re walking into. Another concern is the way in which data is captured from a young age.
Just recently, YouTube was fined more than US$170 million ($271m) for collecting children’s personal data while they were watching videos. The problem is that locally we are largely powerless against this until something happens abroad. The giants of the tech world aren’t going to change their habits on the basis of what we scream from our corner of the world.
At least local broadcasters can be held accountable by regulators and lawmakers here in New Zealand. TVNZ’s Aitken says they only capture the name, gender and age of their users and that this information is not shared with any third party advertisers. If in the future TVNZ is caught breaking this rule and misusing data or distributing content that’s unsafe for children, we have local measures that can hold them to account. The same cannot be said of any of the big tech companies that run their businesses from abroad.
So as we head into a streaming-first world, the question for parents is who they trust to look after their kids’ eyeballs. Our local broadcasters or the “don’t be evil” crew in Silicon Valley?