TikTok It continues to be the social network that is growing the most has among young audiences. It is a network in which short vertical videos predominate whose algorithm links with the likes of viewers in a matter of minutes.
Television has accustomed us to viewing content in widescreen format (16:9), but social networks such as TikTok or Instagram have promoted the vertical format imposed by the shape of the mobile phone screen. Given this phenomenon, the advertising industry already adapts and generates specific vertical content.
We are facing the era of screens where other social networks such as YouTube and Twitch not only want to conquer the mobile but also television.
In the United States they are derogatorily called “couch potatoes” –couch potato– to passive viewers who spend hours and hours in front of the television. This generation of “lazy” not only has not disappeared over the years but has the prospect of continuing decade after decade.
Despite the fact that it may seem otherwise, the audience does not have an exacerbated interest in interacting with everything they see on the screen. In fact, Netflix offers passive consumption content of 45 minutes and does not even ask us to press the remote to advance to the next chapter of our favorite series.
In this context, while a war is being waged in the living room for the conquest of television, TikTok is doing its thing and sweeping young people.
But this makes us wonder if traditional television is also consumed on this social network. Television content viewed on TikTok has not been natively created in a vertical format: it is taken from its broadcast and cropped to fill the entire screen or is uploaded with two black bars at the top and bottom. But despite these differences in format, many go viral.
Television content on TikTok
A research from the Camilo José Cela University has carried out one of the first x-rays on the presence of television content on TikTok in Spain based on the analysis of 6,000 videos, 412 surveys and interviews with experts.
The results show that 74% of the days that TikTok is used, some content from television is viewed, although its representation compared to other videos represents only 1.8% of the total.
And what television content is the most viewed on TikTok? 90% corresponds to fragments of programs. The perception of the users confirms for the most part that they come across classic television programs while they dive into the social network. The ones that appeared the most times during TikTok viewing were The one that is coming, the anthill, survivors, There is no one living here, master chef and Antenna 3 News.
From a global perspective, the most consumed TV genres on TikTok are entertainment (47%), fiction (30%), and news content (19%). This last piece of information may surprise you, but the truth is that TikTok has become the “new Google” for young people to obtain information despite being a nest of fake news, according to the NewsGuard report.
Who uploads television content to TikTok?
It is also interesting to check whether or not the most consumed television content on TikTok comes from the owners of these programs. The answer is overwhelming, according to the study we have led Ana Maganto-Pérez and who signs this article: Only 3% of the videos from traditional television are uploaded by the audiovisual groups that own their broadcast rights.
Therefore, spontaneous users are those who upload television fragments with a much shorter duration than in their linear television broadcast in order to entertain with a “great television moment”, “funny” and worthy of going viral.
We must take into account that The TikTok algorithm rewards the content more than the broadcaster: If a video is good, it starts to skyrocket in views even though the uploader has few followers. This social network offers the possibility of finding and discovering new content related to the tastes of the users with the aim of promoting the feeling of gratification so that, later, the user returns and receives a new dose of videos.
On the other hand, the scarce presence of television content in this social network contrasts with the beginnings of YouTube, where programs from traditional TV accounted for half of the most viewed videos. This is perhaps due to the fact that, at the beginning of YouTube, the existence of the influencers audiovisual.
Can networks coexist with television?
In this context of audiovisual devices, all screens can coexist. In fact, of the 412 respondents66.3% say they consume more television than TikTok and 61% affirm that they see and know the television content viewed on the social network.
However, more research is needed to analyze the existence of simultaneous consumption. For example, the case of a young person who is watching a linear broadcast of traditional television or a Netflix series while consulting TikTok.
This is already happening and may be a factor to take into account to guide productions towards greater simplicity of the script for series and films and thus facilitate their monitoring while attending to the distractions of the mobile phone.
Jorge Gallardo-CamachoDirector of the Degree in Audiovisual Communication and New Media, Camilo Jose Cela University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. read the original.
