Winter is coming and Kiwis’ appetite for media escalates
Binge no longer refers only to food.
These days, you hear it in references to video-on-demand services, as in ‘‘I binge-watched the first season of Game of Thrones at the weekend.’’
The number of Kiwis gorging on media has been supersized thanks in large part to subscription video services – but it seems not everyone has made the switch.
When the Waikato Times hit the streets, it was clear that some people preferred media of yesteryear.
Kaitlin McCoard, a 16-year-old from Hamilton, still frequents her local DVD store.
‘‘I rent DVDs because I don’t have Netflix or Sky movies … I like to get specific movies instead of waiting for them to come out at the movies.’’
Hamilton’s Jeff Torrens, on the other hand, was even older school. The 57-year-old enjoyed reading the newspaper and headed to the pictures once a week. ‘‘It’s a good night out,’’ he said. But Vanessa Gerrard was part of the change. She doesn’t watch TV. She preferred on-demand apps and streaming.
‘‘I’ve got a kid and I’m working. It’s just easier to go and watch what you want, when you want.’’
Early adoption and increasing access to technology was enabling the consumption of more online media, according to a survey by Glasshouse Consulting.
The research, from April 2016 and commissioned by NZ on Air, was carried out in a phone and online survey of 1400 New Zealanders aged 15 or older. Respondents were asked about what media they consumed ‘‘yesterday’’ and also if they had ‘‘ever used’’ particular media.
It showed traditional media dominance was under pressure because of a growing use of online video on such sites as YouTube and Facebook, and the NZ launch of online subscription video-ondemand services.
In 2016, more 15 to 34-year-olds streamed online video each day than watched linear TV.
Traditional media had been under the pump from falling advertising revenues, with local media companies facing competition from the likes of Facebook and Google. Sky Television’s planned merger with Vodafone NZ was sunk by the Commerce Commission earlier this year.
Publishers Fairfax New Zealand and NZME had its merger plans vetoed earlier this month by the Commerce Commission. Newspaper sales, which provided subscription revenue for both companies, was also in decline, as more people get their news online for free.
Proponents said a merger would allow the companies to cut costs by pooling and cutting resources – which included more than 800 journalists – buying the companies more time to build up alternative sources of revenue.
Massey University media studies lecturer Sy Taffel said the amount of content Kiwis could consume had increased, but it did not mean the type of content we were consuming was expanding.
A big part of subscription-based media was ‘‘complex recommendation algorithms’’, which could dictate the types of media you were exposed to, he said.
‘‘If you’ve listened to this and watched this, here’s something that the system thinks you might like. There’s a lot of debate around this, as to whether it ends up as quite a circular logic that reinforces kind of dominant approaches.
‘‘It means that you’re not going out discovering things on your own as an individual, you’re kind of being fed things that are already in some ways in some kind of demographic that you have been placed within.
‘‘There is also a concern that people engaging heavily in commercial media are doing it in some kind of detriment to civic engagement,’’ he said.
‘‘I think there’s an element of truth to that, but I don’t think it can be quite right to assume that if people weren’t playing video games or watching Netflix, it means that they would be out on the street demanding radical action on climate change, for example.
‘‘I think it’s probably more likely that they would have a couple of friends around for a beer, for example.’’