 | This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page . (Learn how and when to remove these template messages)
|
In television studies, B-television or B-TV is the term used as an analogy to "B-movie" to describe such traits of commercial television as shallowness, lack of originality, sensationalism, preponderance of escapist entertainment to serious news, personalization and dramatization.
The German media scholar Heidemarie Schumacher used the term in 1985 in her article From the True, the Good, the Beautiful to the Truly Beautiful Goods—audience identification strategies on German "B-Television" programs to characterize the development of German commercial television, which adopted "the aesthetics of commercials" with its "inane positiveness radiated by every participant, the inclusion of clips, soft focus, catchy music" as well as "promotion of merchandise through product placement". [1] Schumacher notes that after 1984 deregulation German public television passed its climax and became marginalized. Newly established commercial stations, operating without the burden of societal legitimacy, focused solely on profitability. To establish and maintain viewer loyalty these stations would broadcast reality shows, sensational journalism, daily soap operas, infotainment programs, talk shows, game shows and soft pornography. "Product placement series that unabashedly display" branded products "are the overt expression of a kind of television refunctionalized as a supermarket", [1] laments Schumacher.
In her article Schumacher mentions Amusing Ourselves to Death by an American cultural critic Neil Postman, who formulated the thesis of television programming as a derivative of advertising, creating "a species of information that might properly be called disinformation—misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing".
Like Postman, Schumacher notes that contemporary television advertisement often chooses to reinforce brand loyalty rather than promoting product. This reverse marketing approach is used by television broadcasters to advertise the stations themselves. Schumacher lists three specific principles: grabbing the viewers' attention, establishing emotional involvement with the audience, and maintaining the viewers' interest as the cornerstones to acquiring and maintaining market share. A commercial RTL station described such a building of viewers' loyalty in positive terms: "RTL has discovered something entirely new for television. The viewer". [1]
Schumacher argues that viewer loyalty is established primarily through the representation of familiar emotional situations and the everyday problems of the viewers, which means that private stations broadcast predominantly private affairs. Further development of this approach led to creation of reality TV shows, which generate new realities by intervening directly in the actual life of its participants. Such personalisation and dramatization of television precipitated the "Fall of Public Man", in words of Richard Sennett.
The strategy of creating viewer loyalty through emotional sensations is reflected in scandalous "special news" that "favor sex and crime topics and employ highly affective commentary style, a clip aesthetic as well as a musical accompaniment borrowed from the crime film genre". [1] As an example, Schumacher mentions Real Personal , a talk show about human sexuality that was televised by NBC five times a week during 1990s. "The title itself encapsulates the message of 'B-TV': real people and their 'real' problems are the focus here", [1] contemplates Schumacher.
Mentioning the highly successful entertainment programs of David Letterman and Jay Leno, Schumacher proclaims that a talk show host, seen daily on the television screen, becomes almost a part of the family. "Spreading not only inanity, but also a sense of security", the host "provides a fixed portion of our daily routine" along with a daily soap opera, daily infotainment show or a daily game show.
"Appeals to viewer emotions and the active participation of the consumer enhance the ability of 'B-TV' to exploit the market", concludes Schumacher.
The concept of personalization and dramatization was not lost on the creators of BuzzFeed a quarter century later, when they got interested in why some internet videos become viral. "It turned out that the valuable things did not spread, and the things that did spread were used by people as a proxy of conversation, as an extension of themselves", [2] says Ze Frank, president of BuzzFeed Motion Pictures.
"We looked at the things people share, and we came up with three categories that were interesting to us: first, people expressing a part of their identity. The second is emotional gifting. The third is social information 'Hey, we were talking about this the other day'. The information is already known, it is not new, all it does it helps resurfacing a known entity inside of a social connection. ... How do you use it? If identity can be expressed with content, what kinds of identities you can come up with? ... And then you make a crapload of content ... Our studio makes almost a 100 pieces of short form videos a week. ... [In broadcast television] you have to capture as large audience as possible and program for this audience, because the number of attention slots is finite. This means that 'niche' becomes a pejorative, and many people are left out of media conversation and have no chance to say: 'oh, my god, this is totally me'. The new era [of Internet video] allows us to multiply across these different experiences". [2] This approach worked and brought BuzzFeed millions of views and shares.
Going forward, BuzzFeed realized that a shareable video carrying branded message can reach a wide audience for a fraction of advertising budget used for traditional advertising campaign. "We are applying the same general strategy: what are the values the brand is trying to communicate, and how they fit with the nearest social values that we know are fundamental to the consumer. ... We had a campaign for new lightweight kitty litter. The national campaign shown on broadcast television had people throwing litter into each other. It was beautifully shot, but it did not align with a single social value I can think of. Throwing litter into each other has a zero chance of being used to connect to another human being. So we took a step back and made a video which is more about relationship with cats, and we used the same kind of general idea of voice-over, and the video did really well". [2]
While Schumacher and Postman regret the prevalence of "advertisement television" with low informational and social value on commercial TV stations, BuzzFeed intentionally produce personalized videos with capacity for sharing. Unlike traditional television, where viewers consume the content passively, users of internet video platforms share the videos they identify with, multiplying the effect of an advertising campaign.
Erik Henriksen from Portland Mercury used the term "B-TV" when he reviewed Stargate Atlantis television series to describe the kind of show that is not "genuinely great", but one that "just works—albeit in a vaguely embarrassing and silly way—at entertaining the audience, at stringing along the same characters from week to week, at churning out boilerplate plots that are nonetheless peppered with just enough originality and uniqueness to make them enjoyable and fun and distracting." [3]
BBC News is an international English-language pay television channel owned by BBC Global News Ltd.— a subsidiary of BBC Studios—and operated by the BBC News division of the BBC. The network carries news bulletins, documentaries, and other factual programmes; its programming is based out of studios in London, Washington, D.C., and Singapore. As of April 2023, the channel largely operates as an international feed of the BBC News channel in the UK, sharing the majority of its schedule.
A television advertisement is a span of television programming produced and paid for by an organization. It conveys a message promoting, and aiming to market, a product, service or idea. Advertisers and marketers may refer to television commercials as TVCs.
Regular television broadcasts in the United Kingdom started in 1936 as a public service which was free of advertising, which followed the first demonstration of a transmitted moving image in 1926. Currently, the United Kingdom has a collection of free-to-air, free-to-view and subscription services over a variety of distribution media, through which there are over 480 channels for consumers as well as on-demand content. There are six main channel owners who are responsible for most material viewed.
Television is one of the major mass media outlets in the United States. As of 2011, household ownership of television sets in the country is 96.7%, with approximately 114,200,000 American households owning at least one television set as of August 2013. The majority of households have more than one set. The peak ownership percentage of households with at least one television set occurred during the 1996–97 season, with 98.4% ownership. In 1948, 1 percent of U.S. households owned at least one television while 75 percent did by 1955, and by 1992, 60 percent of all U.S. households received cable television subscriptions.
Simulcast is the broadcasting of programmes/programs or events across more than one resolution, bitrate or medium, or more than one service on the same medium, at exactly the same time. For example, Absolute Radio is simulcast on both AM and on satellite radio. Likewise, the BBC's Prom concerts were formerly simulcast on both BBC Radio 3 and BBC Television. Another application is the transmission of the original-language soundtrack of movies or TV series over local or Internet radio, with the television broadcast having been dubbed into a local language.
Barb Audiences Ltd is a British organisation that compiles audience measurement and television ratings in the United Kingdom. It was created in 1981 to replace two previous systems whereby ITV ratings were compiled by JICTAR, whilst the BBC did their own audience research.
Special Bulletin is a 1983 American drama television film directed by Edward Zwick and written by Marshall Herskovitz, based on a story by both. It was an early collaboration between the two, who would later produce such series as thirtysomething and My So-Called Life. The film was first broadcast March 20, 1983 on NBC as part of NBC Sunday Night at the Movies.
The Daily Buzz is a nationally syndicated news and infotainment program. The show premiered as a 3-hour weekday morning television show on September 16, 2002, initially airing on 10 stations owned and operated by the show's founding owner, ACME Communications. By the time of its April 17, 2015 cancellation, the show was distributed to stations in 149 U.S. television markets. Two years after leaving the air, Buzz would be revived as a weekly series in June 2017, after KEF Media acquired the show's trademark. Despite the fact the revival now broadcasts weekly, the show retains the Daily Buzz name.
Audience measurement measures how many people are in an audience, usually in relation to radio listenership and television viewership, but also in relation to newspaper and magazine readership and, increasingly, web traffic on websites. Sometimes, the term is used as pertaining to practices which help broadcasters and advertisers determine who is listening rather than just how many people are listening. In some parts of the world, the resulting relative numbers are referred to as audience share, while in other places the broader term market share is used. This broader meaning is also called audience research.
MTV Rocks was a British pay television music channel that was operated by ViacomCBS Networks UK & Australia. Its programming consisted of 24-hour non-stop rock/alternative music.
Free Speech TV (FSTV) is an American progressive news and opinion network. It was launched in 1995 and is owned and operated by Public Communicators Incorporated, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, tax-exempt organization founded in 1974. Distributed principally by Dish Network, DirecTV, and the network's live stream at freespeech.org and on Roku, Free Speech TV has run commercial free since 1995 with support from viewers and foundations. The network claims to "amplify underrepresented voices and those working on the front lines of social, economic and environmental justice," predominantly from a progressive perspective.
The WB 100+ Station Group was a national programming service of The WB—owned by the Warner Bros. Entertainment division of Time Warner, the Tribune Company, and group founder and longtime WB network president Jamie Kellner—intended primarily for American television markets ranked #100 and above by Nielsen Media Research estimates. Operating from September 21, 1998 to September 17, 2006, The WB 100+ comprised an affiliate group that was initially made exclusively of individually branded cable television channels serving areas that lacked availability for a locally based WB broadcast affiliate and supplied a nationalized subfeed consisting of WB network and syndicated programs; in the network's waning years, the WB 100+ group began maintaining primary affiliations on full-power and low-power stations in certain markets serviced by the feed.
MTV is a Latin American pay television network that was launched on 1 October 1993 as the Hispanic American version of MTV. It is owned by Paramount Networks Americas, a subsidiary of Paramount Global.
In broadcasting, local insertion is the act or capability of a broadcast television station, radio station or cable system to insert or replace part of a network feed with content unique to the local station or system. Most often this is a station identification, but is also commonly used for television or radio advertisements, or a weather or traffic report. A digital on-screen graphic, commonly a translucent watermark, may also be keyed (superimposed) with a television station ID over the network feed using a character generator using genlock. In cases where individual broadcast stations carry programs separate from those shown on the main network, this is known as regional variation or an opt-out.
Social television is the union of television and social media. Millions of people now share their TV experience with other viewers on social media such as Twitter and Facebook using smartphones and tablets. TV networks and rights holders are increasingly sharing video clips on social platforms to monetise engagement and drive tune-in.
Nielsen Media Research (NMR) is an American firm that measures media audiences, including television, radio, theatre, films, and newspapers. Headquartered in New York City, it is best known for the Nielsen ratings, an audience measurement system of television viewership that for years has been the deciding factor in canceling or renewing television shows by television networks. As of May 2012, it is part of Nielsen Holdings.
Real Personal is an American interview and advice call-in talk show about human sexuality that aired on CNBC from 1990 to 1996. The show was hosted by Bob Berkowitz.
A second screen involves the use of a computing device to provide a different viewing experience for content on another device.
Social media and television have a number of connections and interrelationships that have led to the phenomenon of Social Television, which is an emerging communication digital technology that centers around real-time interactivity involving digital media displayed on television. The main idea behind Social Television is to make television consumption a more active content experience for audiences. In the 2010s, social media platforms and websites allow for television shows to be accessed online on a range of desktop and mobile computer devices, smartphones and smart TVs that are still evolving today in the 2020s. Alongside this, online users can use social media websites to share digital video clips or excerpts from TV shows with fellow fans or even share an entire show online. Many social media websites enable users to post online comments on the programs—both negative and positive—in a variety of ways. Viewers can actively participate while watching a TV program by posting comments online, and have their interactions viewed and responded to in real time by other viewers. Technologies such as smartphones, tablets, and laptop computers allow viewers to watch downloaded digital files of TV shows or "stream" digital files of TV shows on a range of devices, both in the home and while on the go. In the 2020s, many television producers and broadcasters encourage active social media participation by viewers by posting "hashtags" on the TV screen during shows; these hashtags enable viewers to post online comments about the show, which may either be read by other social media users, or even, in some cases, displayed on the screen during the show.
TBD is an American digital multicast television network owned by the Sinclair Television Group subsidiary of the Sinclair Broadcast Group and operated by Jukin Media. Targeting millennial audiences, the network focuses on viral video and reality shows.
