Comparison of Traditional TV and Web-Based TV

Owners and editors of traditional media are highly aware of how important it is for their content and name to appear online, and competitiveness can be observed amongst them in publishing and updating content. At the same time, internet service providers are ambitiously expanding and upgrading infrastructure and constantly changing subscription offers. The diploma thesis is divided into a theoretical and an empirical part. In the empirical part, the author analysed individual media and through the results confirmed or refuted certain assumptions. Throughout the diploma thesis, the author continuously posed two questions: is television as a traditional medium in decline, and does the World Wide Web with its development represent competition for traditional media.

Problem

Owners and editors of traditional media are highly aware of how important it is for their content and name to appear online, and competitiveness can be observed amongst them in publishing and updating content. At the same time, internet service providers are ambitiously expanding and upgrading infrastructure and constantly changing subscription offers. Changes are not only in the bandwidths they offer; in an increasing number of cases, they are also combining television and internet services into user packages.

In the future, the convergence of these media is inevitable. What is a shortcoming in one is an advantage in the other, and vice versa.

Solution and Method

The diploma thesis is divided into a theoretical and an empirical part. With the theoretical part, we wish to understand the basic characteristics as well as the advantages and disadvantages of each medium.

Results

In the empirical part, the author analysed individual media and through the results confirmed or refuted certain assumptions. Throughout the diploma thesis, the author continuously posed two questions: is television as a traditional medium in decline, and does the World Wide Web with its development represent competition for traditional media. Through the theoretical and practical parts, the author obtained many answers to both questions.

Three out of four assumptions posed at the beginning were also confirmed. Through theory, the author discovered that the development of the World Wide Web plays an important role in the information age. Above all, the speed of delivering information is the advantage that the internet exploits the most.

Freedom and comprehensiveness are characteristics that mean increasingly greater plurality for the web compared to other media. At the same time, there is still a fairly democratic choice of information, which can only be influenced by internal supervision, which is of course a great advantage for users, but simultaneously also a great shortcoming. Information can indeed be promptly compared with one another, but we cannot always be certain whether it is absolute, as it often does not appear within the framework of some institution or organisation that would guarantee its credibility.

The development of television as a traditional medium is at this moment almost equivalent to the development of the World Wide Web. One could argue that even more attention is currently being devoted to it. Simultaneously with the technological leap from cathode ray tube television receivers to LCD and plasma technology, which is in itself revolutionary, a global leap from analogue to digital television is also taking place in the background.

With all these changes, it would be difficult to continue speaking of television as a traditional medium. I can certainly assert that television as a traditional medium is in decline, but it is by no means to be expected that television would die out in its functionality; it will only gain more of it. In its current phase, the web does not represent major competition for television.

It is to be expected that the web will move from this point and develop in a competitive direction. However, before the web can be defined as an equivalent to television, quite a few technical limitations will need to be eliminated, which are not directly connected only with the development of the web. Above all, public infrastructure and its development, appropriate market strategy of internet service providers, and of course equipment will play a major role here.

It is to be expected that the development of television and the web will begin to converge rather than compete. In order to answer the initial questions posed, the research dealt with data that would confirm the stated assumptions. The first of these was that respondents spend more time daily browsing the web than watching television.

This assumption proved to be unfounded. From the answers provided, I can conclude that respondents devote more free time to watching television than browsing the web. Given the demographic data, such answers may also be a consequence of the professional status of those surveyed.

We spend most of our working time at the computer, so we do not devote as much time to it in our free time. Reasons for such results may also lie in the comfort that watching television offers us compared to browsing the web. With the rejection of the first assumption, the second was partially confirmed, which was also fully confirmed by the results of the analysis.

Respondents choose television rather than the web for the premiere viewing of television programmes. In addition to the reasons already listed above, the cause is also that many media houses do not enable viewing of programme content on the web in real time, or these contents are restricted. The results of the analysis also showed that major shortcomings of the web are its technical limitations.

Respondents mostly do not choose to watch video content on the web when specific software is required for the content, when they encounter websites during browsing that are unclear and inappropriately designed, or when they encounter poor infrastructure connections with web servers. All previously confirmed assumptions already indicate a logical conclusion, which was also confirmed in this case by the survey results, namely that television viewers and web users, despite all the informational advantages of web content, choose to watch video contributions on television.

Despite the fact that the survey was conducted on a relatively small sample, the results confirmed most of the hypotheses and answered the questions posed. Conducting the survey on a wider sample would present too great a risk for realistic results, as due to improvisation amongst respondents for the television field, considerably more time would be needed and consequently a lack of supervision over the execution of the survey. In any case, a larger number of respondents and more detailed distribution across demographic fields would bring answers to many more open questions.

Although the web, or rather its predecessor ARPANET, has been on the scene since the late 1960s, we cannot shake off the impression that the multitude of computers only connected into a worldwide network in the last two years. In these few years, the web has achieved extraordinary growth, not only in terms of the quantities of information and services it offers; the number of its users has also increased enormously. But the web is not just information, facts, and figures.

The web has become a basic tool for businesspeople and the media. Due to the multitude of potential customers, viewers, and readers, new possibilities for advertising products and services are constantly being researched. The internet is certainly a hot topic of their everyday life, and nothing indicates that it would cool down in the near future.

In the field of traditional television, we can already sense what innovations development brings us, and we can also expect that services will come to the television platform whose beginnings we find on the web today. Programme content of any medium will migrate from device to device, and the central home television receiver will be only one of the terminal devices where reception will be enabled. The global market also talks a great deal about video content on mobile phones and other portable multimedia devices.

The only obstacle still limiting the already sensed web boom is access to the user. However, the question arises whether the winners in this race will be the owners of infrastructure or those who will bring content to the user via this infrastructure.