As ITVX launches and the BBC gets ready to stream not beam, will event viewing become a thing of the past?
Hard to miss the huge television events of the last fortnight. There was Matt Hancock emoting away in the jungle on ITV, England scoring actual goals in the World Cup, and then the former royal couple telling it their way in an orchestrated “drop” of the first episodes of an intimate documentary series on Netflix. And even if none of these offerings registered as a personal “appointment to view”, the noise created has certainly been insistent.
All the same, there are strong hints that the days of the large, live TV audience, with everybody sharing a scheduled broadcast at the same time, are numbered. The plan, after years of rumour, is for all TV output to be available online only within the next 10 years or so. Broadcast channels, with their daily line-up of shows, are doomed. Programmes (originally so-called because they were “programmed”) will come into our homes as streamed, branded products, rather than being beamed to viewers on a pre-ordained timetable.
