This Week’s Insights: Micro-theatre designed for you… YouTube encourages our worst excesses… Public libraries drop movie-streaming services… Radio still rules among millennials.
- What’s More Intimate Than An Experience Designed Just For You? People want experiences that speak directly to them. And they want them to be real and physical (read: happening in front of them in the real world) and not generic. So how about theatre designed specifically for an audience of one or two. In your car. In this case you pick up the actors in your car and they create an experience just for you, One critic tried it out in a suburb of Toronto: “I really picked up three actors who directed me around streets previously unknown to me in downtown Markham and its environs, and who each made me believe in ten short minutes that their situations were really happening.”
- Does YouTube Pander To Its Views Worst Excesses? Duh. Which is why it’s so difficult to control. But YouTube is also a fascinating community to watch for behavior that trends. The latest big thing? YouTube channels that celebrate over-the-top consumerism. As in buying to excess, wasting or destroying expensive items and reveling in uber-consumption. These videos are getting huge audiences. But after more than “200 studies, we know that the more people endorse materialism, the worse their well-being. They’re less empathic, less prosocial, more competitive. They’re less likely to support environmental sustainability. They’re more likely to endorse prejudicial and discriminatory beliefs.” And you know, that sounds like what’s wrong with YouTube.
- Public Library Systems Drop Movie-Streaming Service: The Brooklyn, Queens, and New York Public Library systems began offering cardholders free access to the well-regarded service Kanopy in 2017, and last year about 1% of cardholders used the service. Now the libraries have said that rising costs (Kanopy charged the libraries $2 per view) have made offering too expensive.
- Radio Still Rules For Audience: So what’s the most popular medium for music? You might think it was streaming, given the growth in audio-on-demand. But it turns out that radio still has legs. “Across the board, the Ipsos-iHeartRadio survey found that radio reaches more consumers than any other audio channel, with 85 percent of consumers listening to a radio broadcast at least once per week, outpacing social media at 68 percent and live television at 56 percent. On a daily basis, radio has more than twice the listenership of audio streaming services, with 69 percent of consumers tuning in to the radio at least once a day compared to streaming’s 34 percent.”
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