We’ve all been there; you had a favourite show amongst yourself, or your social circle, just to get the rug pulled from under your feet when your favourite show gets the boot. Why does this happen? Well like all things in business, a television program must generate profit, or die.
Television generates profit through advertising. The more people who view a program, the more the television station can charge advertisers for their advertising time. Unfortunately, the only way that the number of viewers can be estimated, is to bother people at home with surveys.
In the not too distant future, you most likely will be required to setup a user profile to access your favourite program. This will not only provide your television provider with instantaneous viewership numbers, but they will also gain the ability to personalize their advertising, based on the demographic that each individual viewer fits into.
Social television opens the possibility of niche programming. With the provider knowing a good approximation of who’s watching their programming, they will be better able to calculate how much a television series is worth. If we had social television a number of years back, then just maybe, we may have enjoyed more than a half season of Firefly.
