The beasts of the audiovisual future are free: from now on in the worlds of cinema and television nothing could be as before and no one is able to say whether it will be a better or worse future. It started last December 28th Bandersnatch, the first and new interactive film in the successful series Black Mirror, spread by Netflix. This is an important novelty in the world of streaming content because it allows viewers to interact directly on the unfolding of the story.
The mechanism is very simple: immediately after a short tutorial, during the story the characters ask questions or choices are made to the spectators. With the remote control, moving the side arrows, you can decide which way to direct the continuation of the story or, in the absence of choice, the film continues with predefined schemes. The model is already known in the publishing world with interactive books where, at the end of each chapter, a choice is proposed which refers to other chapters placed in a non-sequential order.
Not much time has passed since the phenomenon of "do-it-yourself programming" was highlighted, of non-linear television, where the viewer was no longer obliged to follow the traditional programming but was free to tailor his own media diet best suited to his own interests and lifestyles.
In this way, a new generation of viewers has grown up which is making traditional broadcasting models tremble, prompting the BBC (see the recent 2018 Business Plan) to question itself on how to deal with the growing loss of young people from its programmes. In this sense, the revolution of the audiovisual world is about to end and own some images of Bandersnatch they highlight it in a very suggestive way. There are sequences that show the three great areas of the civilization of images at the same time: first of all cinema (because Black Mirror is a film anyway), then television because everything takes place and can be seen on the small screen and, lastly, because the story we are talking about refers to the world of video games and it is undeniable that the latter have contributed, and still do, strongly to the development of digital content.
For the moment it is only an experiment of which, of course, we will know almost nothing about the results because, as is well known, Netflix does not make audience data public. We only know the number of subscribers, which is growing steadily in almost all continents: the latest estimates gave over 137 million contracts, of which over one million in Italy, and revenues growing to over 4 billion. We also know (see article on FIRSTonline) that while the whole world tecstream is going through a critical time on hardware, that of content is growing steadily. From this point of view we read the growth of attention and presence on the market of other giants such as Amazon and Google or the new Fox-Disney polo shirt which promises to put over 20 billion investments in new content on the plate. Whoever owns the libraries – cinematographic first of all – or whoever is able to be on major events can win the competition (see Sky with sport).
The history of Netflix, from this point of view, is illuminating. It may not be entirely coincidental that the new (very successful) series de The paper house will be set in the headquarters of the most important Spanish telecommunications company: Telefonica while in the first series it was the Central Bank. In fact, the heart of the business for Reed Hastings' company is the diffusion of its products on the net. At first the game was all about the distribution of old VHS cassettes, then DVDs, but now there is a strong shift in the production of films intended for different platforms, including traditional viewing in cinemas. Just in recent days, to underline the success of these choices, the film Roma by Alfonso Cuaron won the Golden Globe after winning the Golden Lion in Venice.
2019 promises to be full of news for our country: as communicated by the IT Media Consulting company, it is expected that the use and consumption of television content via the Internet, which already affects over 3 million families in the next few years, could affect over 8 million of homes. The vehicle of this development is the web, the other real big business of the near audiovisual future.
