Television

Brisbane.
The next session at ANZCA 2009 starts with Lelia Green, presenting on the practices of a small affinity group (a LAN clan) of year 11-12 students in suburban Perth. None of these young men could quantify what amount of time they spent online each day; they used the Net extensively during their non-school time, at any rate. The study focussed especially on the use of Bittorrent, which was invented in 2002 and has been especially used for sharing movie and television content. Bittorrent use becomes more effective the more users are sharing the same file, of course, and there were some 4 million users online at any one point by 2006. By February 2009, some 160 million users had downloaded Bittorrent softwares.

Brisbane.
The next session at ANZCA 2009 is a panel session discussing the future role of public service broadcasting, focussing on Australia's multicultural broadcaster SBS. This is introduced by my colleague Terry Flew, who notes that SBS is a distinctively different type of public broadcaster, making a very specific contribution to multiculturalism and citizenship.

The first panellist to speak is Stuart Cunningham from the CCi. If SBS had to be invented today, he says, it wouldn't be - today's media environment is fundamentally different from that of the 1970s and 1980s from which it emerged, and today there is a plethora of media channels available to citizens. Additionally, the role of public broadcasters has changed fundamentally - the culture wars of the past decades render a government intervention for the development of a public broadcaster to promote multiculturalism inconceivable today. Protection and projection of public culture is no longer an unproblematic public goal.

Hamburg.
The next speaker at Alcatel-Lucent Foundation / HBI 2009 is Volker Lilienthal, Augstein Foundation Professor at the University of Hamburg. He notes the reception theory-based definition of quality which Rainer Esser highlighted in the previous presentation, but himself continues with a production theory-based definition, which holds that journalists can also produce quality journalism even if their audience is no longer interested in such content.

Product placement, he notes, may be acceptable if editorial independence remain unaffected. But how can this work in a concrete case - editors and journalists, after all, are employees of their organisations, and are unlikely to be entirely independent from their economic agendas. Journalists must try, though, to make clear decisions about what content is relevant, what audiences should be confronted with, and what content is merely a result of particular business or other interests.

Hamburg.
Stefan Engels from legal firm Lovells LLP is the next speaker at Alcatel-Lucent Foundation / HBI 2009. He outlines the new rules for product placement, but begins by outlining again the indepence of publication processes, the protection of informed recipients, the need for neutrality of the media in the free market, as the three key drivers of the separation of advertising and content which is required of all edited media under German law.

New rules from the European Union, in December 2007, and their implementation under German law which is proceeding with current draft legislation and must be completed by the end of 2009, allow the possibility of loosening these separation requirements, but do not require changes.

Hamburg.
We move on to the post-lunch session at Alcatel-Lucent Foundation / HBI 2009, which opens with an introduction by Wolfgang Schulz, Director of the Hans-Bredow-Institut where I'm currently based. He notes the legal problems with the integration of advertising into programming (as product placement, or in related forms). Traditionally, German law requires a clear separation of advertising and programme content; do changes in advertising principles weaken this separation, or can it be upheld?

Hamburg.
Marc Schwieger's talk at Alcatel-Lucent Foundation / HBI 2009 is followed by a panel discussion with Marc, Martin Hoffmann from MME Moviement, and Martin Krapf from IP Germany. Krapf begins by noting that even the $70m in product placement advertising in James Bond movies remain a small component of all advertising; this is no revolution in advertising yet. While product placement will certainly grow, conventional advertising will continue to be the leading form. Indeed, product placement is most effective when combined with conventional advertising.

Hamburg.
The first speaker at the Alcatel-Lucent Foundation / HBI conference is Marc Schwieger from advertising agency Scholz & Friends. He, too, picks up the product placement theme: products, of course, are everywhere in everyday life, too, so telling stories from real life is difficult without showing the products that are part of it. Some 49% of Germans find product placement annoying; this is less than the 63% who dislike conventional ads. Placed products are also recalled effectively - but do comparatively little to encourage users to buy those products.

Leuven.
Up next at EuroITV 2009 is Nele Simons, who studies television viewing practices. TV is perceived as a structuringh medium, a social medium, and a lean-back medium, but these are all based on traditional, conventional TV viewing practices. These are all challenged by current technological and social changes impacting on television.

Conventionally, the TV broadcasting structure brings routine structure to the daily life of many people, but timeshifting, spaceshifting, and on-demand access are becoming increasingly common. Broadcasters no longer have control over the time, space, and content of television viewing (also because television is no longer everything that's being viewed on the TV screen).

Leuven.
The next speaker at EuroITV 2009 is Jan Heß, who is evaluating the social use of media in real-life environments. This builds on cultural probes and diary studies as a self-ethnographic approach.

Diarised outcomes from this study related mainly to television consumption in the living room, with a smaller number of entries also about PC usage for entertainment, and DVD and cinema events. Insights from this were that diary entries could be divided into routine usage, dynamic usage and interruptions, and parallel (multitasking) activities.

Leuven.
The next presenter at EuroITV 2009 is An Jacobs, whose interest is in the potential role of television in gaming. A combination and convergence between television and gaming is complicated by the existing routines of using each medium, which need to be altered in order to arrive at new models. The television set remains mainly in a shared space, usually in the living room, and in recent time, gaming has traditionally taken place elsewhere - playing on a PC, for example, also makes it less likely that the player is interrupted by other household members. Even the arrival of new media forms in the households doesn't tend to change such routines.