doxa.comunicación | nº 28, pp. 241-260 | 243
January-June of 2019
María José García-Orta, Victoria García-Prieto and Miriam Suárez-Romero
ISSN: 1696-019X / e-ISSN: 2386-3978
is the case, for example, with the deployment of broadband, the development of new technological devices, the use of intelligent televisions (Smart TVs) or the development of content for home consumption, among others.
Much of the flourishing of this system is related to the consumption of series. Based on a study carried out by Kantar Media (Garza, 2017, online), the following comment was made: “The consumption of TV series is spreading more and more around the world.
In Spain, 50% of the population with Internet access consumes television series on the Internet”. In addition, we are witnessing a consolidation of this trend with consumers who “are increasingly calling for on-demand television service to be offered by these platforms and to be adapted to their needs, given that 30% of them report using this type of service to create their own television programming schedules” (Garza, 2017). As pointed out by Onieva (2017, online), Spaniards spends an average of three hours a day watching television. Nevertheless, consumption habits are different, as “four out of ten Spaniards watch content online at least once a week. Moreover, some of the culprits of this phenomenon are video-on-demand platforms such as Movistar, Netflix and HBO Spain, which are experiencing a boom in the number of subscribers they have”. According to figures from 2018 of the National Commission on Markets and Competition (CNMC) (Comisión Nacional de los Mercados y la Competencia), the most widely used platform at the end of 2017 was Movistar+, with 2.16 million users, representing 13.5% of all households with an Internet connection in Spain, almost duplicating the data from the previous year. Netflix was second with 1.5 million subscribers or 9.1% of households, a three-fold increase in one year. In third place we find Vodafone TV online, with 5.9% of households (944,000 subscribers); Amazon Prime Video with 3.5% (566,000 subscribers); Orange TV online with 2.8% (450,000 subscribers), and in sixth place is HBO with 2.3% of households (363,000 subscribers). In short, three out of ten households used paid services to view audiovisual content online at the end of last year (CNMC, 2018).
In light of these figures, we are faced with a general change in the habits and consumption routines of users in the context of “a society that is always connected and fully digitised, and is in the process of redefining how it allocates its time when consuming products and services from the media” (Ortega, González Ispierto and Pérez Peláez, 2015: 643).
The use of the mobile phone has undoubtedly been one of the disruptive elements in this transformation process, “and is a consequence of bandwidth improvement, concurrence in audiovisual servers, and of course a clear [sic] evolution in mobile telephone equipment, and thus the viewing of audiovisual content is developing and establishing itself by leaps and bounds” (Caldera-Serrano and León-Moreno, 2017: 63).
Adelantado and Martí (2011) also analysed the possibilities of the mobile phone as a platform for disseminating and consuming audiovisual content. They highlighted one of the greatest advantages it has brought: “the conquest of time and space that until now has not been ascribed to traditional media consumption” (Adelantado and Martí, 2011: 102). A few years later, Ortega, González Ispierto and Pérez Peláez (2015) highlighted that “the uses and consumption of audiovisual products among young people are progressively shifting toward interactive distribution channels located on individual and personalised intelligent screens” (p. 643).
With the rapid development of this product, in addition to tablets, non-linear television has acquired its own space, which has been taken away from traditional television, yet they both coexist together. De Mena Dávila (2015) believes that the