At the intersection of the “Good Ol’ Days” and a Brave New Media World
The Real House of Cards —Disruptive Mediums
As someone who has always been enamored with politics and worked in the medium for almost a decade; I find the Netflix original series House of Cards fascinating.
The series is set in present day and deals primarily with power dynamics, ruthless pragmatism, manipulation, and doing bad things for the greater good.
Although there had been similar political shows such as The West Wing portraying insider politics, its format is more reminiscent of the “Good Ol’ Days” when traditional cable ruled the airways and one had to wait faithfully on a designated date and time to see their favorite show.
Disruptive Media is a term adapted from business where “a disruptive media technology helps create a new market and value network, and eventually goes on to disrupt an existing market and value network.” Netflix’s House of Cards exemplifies a disruptive media by releasing its entire first season (13 episodes) all at once. The company in a broad stroke shifted the viewing paradigm and provided its subscribers the freedom to watch as much or little as one is able to. This shift has lead to an increase in binge watching but I am not complaining; although a survey conducted by Netflix, placed the number of binge-watching viewers as “watching between 2–6 episodes of the same TV show in one sitting.” at 73%.
For Gen Xers, we are at the intersection of remembering the good old days when cable ruled the air versus the array of services such as Hulu, Amazon Prime, etc, siphoning major traffic away from TV screens. Nowadays, more individuals are turning away from traditional media and view media on their tablets, mobile phones and computers. In fact, for the third quarter of 2013, Time Warner Cable lost over 300,000 television subscribers reflecting the larger trend that over five million cable subscribers have disappeared in the past five years including yours truly. This trend is only exacerbated by millennial demographic pushing away from traditional television all together. Cable and media conglomerates continue losing revenue and serves as the big impetus of the Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger as well as AT&T’s bid to acquire DirecTV to continue to stay relevant in the rapidly changing media landscape.
This viewing shift has major implications not only for television shows but the entire political system including advertising effectively. As homeland security practitioners, it would be smart to start building on the benefits of big data and internet analytics, and incorporate social media to our digital outreach strategy.
