Migration of Television Audience to Digital Media: Impacts on TV Schedule and Journalism

This article discusses the audience migration between Brazilian television and digital media. Since 2000, Brazilian free-to-air TV audience dropped by 28%. In the same period, Internet access increased 400%, and digital paid TV, more than 500%. The phenomenon accentuated after 2006, when pay TV had begun to grow on average 30% per year, and the Internet, 26%. A statistical comparison between this fall of audience with the increase of pay TV subscribers and growth of broadband Internet access shows that there is a migration of free-to-air TV audience towards these two media. Nowadays, one third of Brazilian population has access to pay TV and more than half use the Internet. Through empirical investigation and statistical analysis, this paper investigates the implications for such decrease and the motivation of audience migration. The most important consequences are: a partial reformulation of television schedule, programme focus and targets; transmedia productions, including new web narratives; focus on mobile applications, with interactivity and public participation; and new approaches on newscasts, which are becoming more informal, focused on opinion and local news.