The Dutch Public Broadcasting (NPO) wants more younger viewers to watch NPO1. “Now 80 percent of the viewers are older than 50. That has to be reduced to 70 percent”, says NPO director Frans Klein. News hour. Today it was announced that from next year the regular TV broadcasts of Other times are deleted.
Online a petition has been started to change the mind of the NPO, which was signed nearly 40,000 times on Friday evening.
Klein thinks it is important to innovate in order to appeal to a younger target group. “We will not stop with Other Times: we want to broadcast 6 to 10 specials and we want to create a new history environment online with Other Times,” says Klein.
The scrapping of regular TV broadcasts is not the result of cutbacks, says Klein when asked. “It is absolutely not a money issue.” Klein would like to attract more younger viewers to TV. “Above all, we want to get a better balance in the programming. The group aged 20 to 49 consists of 6 million people, and the group 50+ consists of 5.5 million people.”
‘A pointless discussion’
Professor of Media Studies Mark Deuze believes that it should not be about getting a younger target group to watch TV again. “Young people, and I mean everyone under the age of 45, they no longer live with the newspaper, radio, TV and the internet. They live ‘in the media’ where all these forms overlap and we no longer have loyalty to a person. platform, provider or program, ”he says.
“The whole discussion about whether or not to broadcast programs, that is a whole 20th-century discussion. It no longer fits in with this time at all. That is why the policy of the NPO often feels as if they do not really know what we as Dutch people are currently dealing with. media are working on. “
As far as Deuze is concerned, media makers and the NPO should not think primarily from TV, but from a combination of all those new media forms. “Nowadays I have to explain to my freshmen what TV is, because they don’t know it anymore. That does not mean that it is dying out, because all forms of media continue to exist. But if you as a maker or broadcaster only focus on television, then you are your own grave. digging. “
Journalism or entertainment
Klein says that it is certainly not the case that the NPO is engaged in a transition in which less educational, informational and journalistic programs are programmed, and more entertainment.
“We now spend fifty percent on informational programs. We also need to innovate and change in that segment. We need to get the mix of target groups that we want to reach right, and that’s what we’re doing now,” he says.
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