Media Artefact - Assessment

Well I handed this in so it's not being assessed on here but I was just interested to see whether you the reader of this blog would like to see more of this kind of writing. The next thing you read is the first assessment this semester in my media module, enjoy!


Media Artefact Assessment – BBC iPlayer

The media artefact I am going to talk about for this assessment is a relatively new one, but one that I believe has helped change the way we watch and enjoy television and radio. Yes it’s the iPlayer, the BBC’s foray into the world of ‘catch-up TV’ and one of the first catch up services in this country. Looking at the archives on the Media Guardian website, you can see that the idea was initially deemed controversial, with Ofcom having to make major changes to it in order for it to get the go ahead[1]. It seems quite odd to think now that the iPlayer left its beta testing period and went completely live in late 2007, as it’s become such a widely used feature since.

Since its inception, the iPlayer has only become more popular and widely used as the early adopters and digital natives were joined by those who had once looked on the new media sceptically, and those who had seen it as a threat to the old media. The BBC produced the iPlayer in order to move into the catch up TV market, whose sole legal inhabitant was Channel 4’s 4oD (ignoring for the purposes of this assignment illegal sites like TV Catch Up). This is an example of a technologically deterministic version on history as the technology eventually changed the way we approach TV. The site aimed to provide a service by which users could either watch again or catch up on shows they had missed during the week, changing the way we experience television. Whereas before the schedules dictated how we experienced shows and when, we could now pick and choose, deciding when and where to watch our favourite shows revolutionising the TV experience. This worried some, believing that TV would essentially die out with programmes existing only on tools like iPlayer and 4oD but people and TV itself have adapted to the new media, encouraging users and still retaining its relevance as a medium.

New media should have got rid of TV but people are still watching it for the same reasons they used to. We still have ‘appointment to view’ television but there is a new media interactivity; young people spend more time with new media like iPlayer and social networking, but not at the expense of old media like the TV. According to Kackman et al (2010), television has survived because it has become a ‘converged technology’[2]. The iPlayer is reflective of the far more technologically advanced culture we live in and the disposable nature of it. People are less likely these days to sit and wait for their media products and therefore having content on iPlayer means people can actively choose what they want from their service, making users more powerful in their interaction with their favourite programmes. With links to other new media like Twitter and Facebook, iPlayer is becoming just as powerful as the main BBC channels themselves.

References:

[1]Deans, J. (2007). BBC iPlayer gets go-ahead. Available: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/jan/31/news.bbc. Last accessed 21st March 2011.

[2] Kackman, M (2010). Flow TV: Television in the Age of Media Convergence. USA: Routledge.


Until next time. Stay Classy Internet.