Ph.d. afhandling, Thomas Bjørner

More personalized Television
It seems that some of the viewers in the TV2/North-Digital project request the same
functionality via digital television, as they already know from the Internet. Independence of
time seems to attract viewers. The fact that they can watch what they want when they
wanted it, which is not the case with the traditional analogue TV flow, seems to be
important. This phenomenon was already well known, with the introduction of the
Personal Video Recorder in e.g. American households. The interactive service from
TV2/North-Digital was primarily a set-up of extended tele-text, which also was the reason
why especially the innovators were rather disappointed with the Digital TV project. There
was a tendency among innovators to emphasize the functionality of digital interactive
television, with better picture and sound quality and possibility to send e-mails or make
use of other services on demand.
The research results from the TV2/North-Digital still seem to correspond with a kind of
syllogism of masculine/ feminine relationships to television, similar to that of David Morly,
which is found in his research of 1986. Men like Sports, Documentaries and Realist fiction
and women like fiction programmes and romance. Therefore these individual genre
interests can be considered to cause an individual viewing, also at channel level.
Discovery channel has an extremely high proportion of male viewers, and therefore can
be seen as the “male channel” whereas “Kanal 4” can be considered as a the “female
channel”
Different media use and the worries about the family life
In continuation of the 15 in-debt interviews, there had been made some photos of the
media technology in the households - especially the placement of the set-top-box and
indoor aerial. This was done on the basis of the hypothesis that it is of great importance
were the households have chosen to place their set-top-box according to who, what and
how much the members in the family watch TV2/North-Digital. During the last few years
there has been some focus on the implementation of new technologies in the domestic
environment. This perspective is coming from e.g. HCI (Human Computer Interaction)
research results, and they draw attention to the importance of the interaction between the
technological and social arrangements of the home by building an analytic model for
320