Space
When people talked about watching TV shows and movies in the days before streaming and online gaming were mainstream activities, it was generally assumed they meant that literally. You’d sit down in front of a CRT or projector screen, point your eyes and ears at it, and absorb the lights and sounds that came out.
It’s not an overstatement to say things have changed dramatically. In particular, the rise of interactive entertainment and its accessibility via portable devices is turning the traditional viewing experience into something quite different.
The Second Screen Takeover
Most prominently, the proliferation of smartphones and the ability to use them to provide interactive entertainment at any time means attention spans of viewing audiences are often divided. A person watching a TV show at home might also be looking online for blackjack games on their phone to, you know, pass the time during ad breaks, for example.
So-called second-screening is a habit that’s so common, it’s even having an impact on how shows and movies are written. Content that’s created specifically for background viewing has to eschew complex plots in favour of simple stories, and regular expositional dialogue is needed to ensure viewers who zoned out earlier can be brought back up to speed.
The Demand for Interactive Viewing
Another upshot of interactive entertainment taking over people’s free time is that streaming services are choosing to compete with this directly. Netflix has gone further than most by integrating games as part of its video platform, many of which also require the use of the viewers’ phones in order to operate as intended. It’s a somewhat blunt solution to the fears that second screening will steal audience engagement away from streaming services.
And we’ve seen a number of choose-your-own-adventure style releases on streaming platforms, with audiences able to make decisions about how the story progresses using their remotes.
Then, in movie theaters, audience interactivity is taking on new forms as a direct result of online culture. The chicken jockey memes and the resultant audience participation around the Minecraft Movie reflects how there’s much more of an overlap between mediums and communication platforms, with traditional channels like cinema having to integrate with newer equivalents in order to survive.
The Gaming Phenomenon
Despite people wanting more interactivity from their entertainment, we’re also going through a period of rapid growth in game streamer viewership. That is, people watching others play games remotely, without directly controlling the action themselves. Here, the appeal is being part of a communal experience and being able to interact in chat.
Honestly, it’s a counterintuitive yet intriguing idea; while we’re more capable of playing games ourselves than at any point in history, many of us outsource this to someone else and go back to being passive consumers of this type of content.
So, there’s little question that what it means to ‘watch’ content has changed drastically, and in a relatively short period. Whether this is a good or bad thing is moot, because there’s no rolling back this change. Creatives just need to adapt to what audiences expect, and what they can be expected to do while watching.