When a TV channel reinvents itself online: Post-broadcast consumption and content change at BBC Three

Abstract

In February 2016, BBC Three became the first television (TV) channel in the world to close its linear broadcasting operation and instead prioritize offering its programming on demand, via the internet. Two Danish channels – both also youth-focused – followed in January 2020 for the same reason: budget cuts. Although the effects of ending offline distribution on the size and behaviour of newspaper and magazine audiences have been investigated, this article is the first to investigate the effects on a TV channel. The results show that BBC Three’s audience shrank by 60–70% after it closed its linear TV channel. The intensity with which the channel was viewed was even more sharply reduced: annual viewing minutes after the switch were 89% less than the channel achieved on linear TV before (and around 72% less if viewing of BBC Three-commissioned/acquired content on other BBC TV channels is included). The mix of programme genres consumed changed too, although further research is required to establish the part played by the change in distribution mechanism. This study furthers our understanding of media platform cessation by showing how change in the size of a media outlet’s audience after ending offline distribution may be affected by the proportion of its audience that consumes it exclusively offline before and how, irrespective of media platform, ending offline distribution seems to cause a sudden and substantial fall in the time spent with a media brand by its audience.

Predicting Streaming Audiences for a Channel’s On-Demand TV Shows: Discerning the Influences of Choice Architecture, Consumer Agency, and Content Attributes

“…However, for the absence of socio-demographic variables in our models to actually be a limitation, there would need to be evidence, firstly, that there is socio-demographic variation in what influences viewers to choose to watch particular television programmes and, secondly, that the demographic composition of BBC Three's linear TV and streaming audiences differs significantly. We have not found any evidence of the former, and, at least in terms of age, there is evidence that BBC Three's steaming and broadcast audience are very similar (Thurman, 2021).…”

“…The first step was to create a key value pair dictionary that could be by the Python script responsible for the webscraping. This dictionary was created from data obtained, via specialist data bureau Digital-i, from the Broadcaster's Audience Research Board (BARB) and coded by Thurman (2021) that provided a list of the BBC Three programs available on the iPlayer during our data collection window.…”

Audiovisual Data: Data-Driven Perspectives for Media Studies. 13th Media Mutations International Conference

“…From much of these challenges and data, however, academics are usually excluded, with rare exceptions (e.g., Scaglioni 2021, Thurman 2021, see also Avezzù 2022 on the geographies of film and TV consumption). This exclusion hinders the communication that we would like to see, which is not only between the humanities and the hard sciences, but also that which should result from the encounter between the university and the audiovisual industry.…”

Predicting streaming audiences for a channel’s on-demand TV shows: Discerning the influences of choice architecture, consumer agency, and content attributes

“…The proportion of the channel’s output (in minutes) devoted to the comedy genre fell, while the proportions devoted to drama and factual increased. The availability of entertainment programming remained broadly similar, while news, sport, music, and children’s programming practically disappeared (Thurman, 2021). Although sport and music – along with news programming – had made up relatively small proportions of the channel’s linear output (Thurman, 2021), the channel did broadcast some popular sporting and musical events, such as Formula One motor races.…”

“…On 1 February 2022, BBC Three returned to linear television in order, the BBC hoped, to ‘grow our offer for younger audiences’ (Ravindran, 2021). The size of its target audience had fallen by 69% (on a weekly basis) after it went online-only, and the annual time spent viewing the channel had dropped by 89% (Thurman, 2021).…”