Supply and consumption diversity of NPO’s genres on linear TV and on demand

Abstract

Over the last few decades, the process of platformisation has been acknowledged and researched more often, including its impact on public service media (PSM). The Dutch public broadcaster, NPO (Nederlandse Publieke Omroep), has adjusted accordingly to the digitisation of services by offering their on demand service, NPO Start. While doing so, NPO maintains a public task of reaching different audience groups by maintaining the public values diversity and pluriformity. Therefore, it is significant to analyse whether NPO meets their audience’s demands by offering diverse content. Hence, this research aims to analyse whether the supply and consumption diversity of NPO have changed between linear TV and on demand over the last four years with regards to their genres. This is especially significant within these times, in which the media landscape is altering continuously and rapidly and NPO strives to remain relevant to their audience. In order to analyse this, the operationalisation conducted by van der Wurff (2004) is adopted by implementing the concepts of open diversity-as-sent, open diversity-as-received, reflective diversity, intra-channel diversity, and inter-channel diversity. Here, the competition of channels is also crucial to reflect on, as this influences what the audience watches. The results suggest that there are differences in consumption diversity between linear TV and on demand as well as between prime time and daytime. This is related to the channel diversity, which emphasises NPO’s policy in which certain audience groups are aimed to be reached on particular channels and during particular time frames. It is crucial to continuously analyse whether current adjustments in their policies meet their audience’s demands in order to remain relevant and maintain social welfare.