AMT Lab @ CMU: The landscape of the unscripted video industry is changing. Part 1 of this series explores four case studies demonstrating the current landscape and what features are most appealing to audiences. In this section, the researchers look to experts in the video industry and fans to explore how the landscape is changing and what content providers should expect.
3 comments:
Although I’d heard of the term “unscripted” more as a theatrical term used to describe the improvisation, I had never heard of “unscripted content” as a genre in the television landscape. It is always interesting to learn about the video industry, since they are very close yet quite different to the theatre industry. Besides, the trend in the video industry certainly affects the world of entertainment. The article reminded me of a friend of mine who only watches reality shows or sports on TV, because he thinks how people act in front of TV cameras for soap operas is too cheesy and unrealistic. However, he is also a big fan of musicals and enjoys watching actors acting dramatically along with the script. I think the difference in what he expects from video content and live theatre is comprehensible. I believe as video contents become more customized for each user, not only in terms of genres but also when, where, and how to watch, watching live theatre would become more and more a conventional than an alternative.
This was an interesting dive into a corner of the media industry that I imagine most of us don’t think much about. It’s telling that most of the executives hit on the same ideas: documentary style shows are growing and will continue gaining popularity, unscripted content has largely failed to target audiences that aren’t white women, and that drama and production values have a direct relationship to success of unscripted content. None of these trends are particularly surprising, but they are interesting to have analyzed nonetheless.
I wonder if nature documentaries are included as unscripted content. The recent success of Netflix’s “Our Planet” seems fortuitous.
It’s also funny to me that “millennials” are so often used as a blanket term for “young people,” when in fact they mentioned age 26 as a threshold for young audiences. Most people below 26 are gen z, and likely don’t identify with the millennial label.
Looking at the statistics in the article, the ones I found the most interesting were the ones regarding the amount of attention and the most common reasons for watching - reality TV often gets a bad rap for being mindless entertainment, but that is often the reason people watch it. When things are stressful in other aspects of a person’s life, it can be nice to turn on something that takes no effort to consume whatsoever. I also thought the graph displaying the reasons for watching to be interesting, in that it points out that no one really watches for the plot, but instead watches for the people and how they interact with each other. When I first saw this title, my first thought was actually not reality TV, but the somewhat recent rise of youtube and twitch streaming as a legitimate source of income, and I think an interesting comparison could be drawn there as well.
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