Broadcast television flow scheduling and the viewers' zapping: conflicting practices

• Autor(a) principal: Torres, Eduardo Cintra
• Data de Publicação: 2016
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.14/33843
• topic: Audience; Flow; Ratings; Scheduling; Television; Zapping

Broadcast television and its audiences live a paradoxical situation: on the one hand, channels still schedule according to the concept of flow; on the other hand, viewers' zapping counters it. This paper wishes to ascertain the audiences' practices regarding their fidelity to flow. The research tries to answer these questions: how many viewers watch the same channel during a long consecutive period? How many viewers watch a complete programme? Are there significant differences in zapping versus flow faithfulness according to sex, age, socio-demographic class and cable TV access? Is "companionship television" still a viewers' consume practice? The research verifies the effectiveness of flow scheduling, which, while being an ideology and a scheduling and self-promotion practice, is not a practice of most viewers. The results show that flow faithfulness flow is a minority behaviour mainly of older people, women, lower classes and viewers without occupation.