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Hands up everyone who remembers NZoom.com and the huge hopes TVNZ had that
it would provide a vehicle for managing the convergence of broadcast and
online formats?
NZoom is now long-gone of course, having been replaced by TVNZ.co.nz, a site
built with far more reasonable expectations.
Indeed, the whole "convergence" thing seems to have become quite a non-event
and I find it rather disappointing to see just how little effort most
broadcasters are putting into their online presence these days.
Although TVNZ has done its best to support TV1 and TV2, it would seem that
CanWest has all but given up on leveraging the Net to boost its viewer
ratings, which is a great shame.
But the reason I'm airing this topic today is because I was absolutely gobsmacked
when I checked out what Prime TV were doing with the Net to promote and support their
major investment in the Paul Holmes show.
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It's no secret that Prime have spend a shirt-load of money in this attempt
to snatch a big chunk of the prime-time (no pun intended) audience so I fully
expected that they'd have spent a few grand on also ensuring that their
website did its best to drive viewers to the show.
Given that "interaction" seems to play a big part in the new show, I also
expected to see some kind of web interface to the scrolling feedback banner
at the bottom of your TV screen and lots of ways in which Net users could
get some extra value.
Unfortunately I was bitterly disappointed.
My heart did skip a beat when I saw that there was a "News and Current Affairs"
link on the main page of the website - but it sank again when I saw that
all it did was link to this page.
Wow, that must have taken someone all of about three minutes to whack up and
stick on a webserver!
Even worse, it's already out of date, containing phrases such as "about to
launch" and "it’s a very exciting countdown to the first night".
This page also claims "we’re going to want the people to react to us not just
after the programme but during it as well" but the only mechanism provided
for doing this is an email address.
What a massive disappointment and wasted opportunity.
Where's the streaming video version of last-night's programme so that those
who missed it can see what happened?
Where's the discussion forum that allows viewers to log on and discuss the
topics covered by the program that evening?
Is it any wonder that "convergence" is dead when broadcasters completely
ignore the power of their web-presence to hike interest and participation
in their programmes?
If anyone from Prime is reading this, drop me a line
and I'll give you a list of easily implemented ideas to properly leverage
your web presence to extremely positive effect. I won't be holding my breath
though.
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