Last year, I bought a new TV for the bedroom. It was a Toshiba unit, with probably forty different features over the older TV that had been there for a decade. So one of the newer features was this button on the remote control. It's the 'Netflix' button, and yes....the TV is tied into my home server, and my Netflix account.
I'll admit....I don't watch that many shows via that TV, but the feature is there to automatically go to Netflix.
It kinda got brought up over the weekend that both public German networks (ZDF and ARD) are a bit worried over this trend. They've noticed that just about every TV now sold in Germany.....has the button that goes direct to Netflix. Some are including the Amazon button as well.
This video-on-demand trend? You can go to younger Germans (say between the ages of 15 and 25), and the vast majority will admit that they use the streaming method a good bit, and few watch more than an hour or two per week of public TV. My son will proudly proclaim it's been more than a dozen years since he watched a single hour of German public TV.
This button thing, and the streaming business.....a major trend? Yes. And here's the harsh reality....in another decade, you will have around 50-percent of the general public who hate the TV tax, and some political agenda will come up where parties have to divide themselves with the pro-public TV crowd and the anti-TV tax crowd.
A silly button to drive this agenda? Simply by adding this cheap feature into the TVs and allowing one single button to lead you onto Netflix? Here's the curious thing.....there's nothing much that public TV can do.....if they want to reverse the lost viewer trend.
1 comment:
Many here in USA are leaving network television entirely. Many watch programming via some sort of streaming service such as Amazon or Hulu. Direct TV, a satellite television programming provider, charges something like $300 per year, on top of their month subscription which could be around $100, to watch all the NFL football games. Otherwise, their customers have the option of something like 6 games each weekend.
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