The silent war waged on smart TVs

The main television channels in the world have written a letter to the European Union asking them to regulate big tech companies so that they cannot abuse their dominant position in smart TVs. More and more viewers are consuming their content from the input menu offered by systems powered by Google, Amazon, Apple or Samsung, and this gives them a great ability to highlight some channels – especially their own – over others. An interesting factor is that the complaint is not only supported by European televisions such as RTL, Canal+ or Mediaset, but also by American operators such as Disney, Warner, Paramount or Universal. The EU, in an identity and legitimacy crisis, can capitalize here as a global refuge from the deregulatory wave.

For several decades, opaque audience meters have been the thumb of Caesar deciding whether a program survives or dies. In Spain, there are about 6,000 devices that increasingly offer weaker data: as consumption is shifting away from traditional channels, the system is no longer very reliable if you segment geographically or by profile, you go at ungodly hours with little consumption or you focus on specialized channels. The future of audience measurement will be digital. And this is where big tech companies have the upper hand. It is of no use to set European work quotas, for example, if they never appear in the supposedly personalized recommendations and the titles are buried in the deepest bowels of thescroll infinite. The circle closes when, afterwards, the low audience obtained is used to renegotiate obligations downwards. This issue may seem like a minor battle – deciding what we choose, slumped on the sofa – but what is at stake is the imposition of an audiovisual culture where the one in charge is not the director or the screenwriter, but the algorithm.