The idea of the ambient TV, a concept proposed by The New Yorker in 2020, comes to mean that type of television of doubtful artistic quality, which abandons the ambition to seek excellence in its kind and on the contrary it is formed to entertain Spectator, regardless of whether it is really paying attention or not.
Although science does not agree on whether technology is really shortening our attention, the feeling is real for a large majority of people. Access to infinite video feeds in Instagram, Tiktok or YouTube Shorts reels makes us more and more prone to lighting the mobile screen every couple of minutes to see something, and this also affects our audiovisual consumption routines. Leisure competing with leisure.
As some pessimistic voices point out from the entrails of Hollywood, who see in the low salaries and in the commitment to AI a hard blow for film studios, large platforms like Netflix could be heading towards this type of content to continue Producing spending less money, taking advantage that, as some think, people simply do not care about what they see.
Emily in Paris could be an example of this type of content, but there is more. The ambient TV contents are going to tend, for example, to overexplain the situations to prevent the viewer from being lost, counting that while seeing any series or film will spend minutes to enter Tiktok, answer a whatsapp or give a review to Twitter , since maintaining attention, even, for an hour and a half in something that is already supposed to be pleasant, seems to be becoming a challenge for more and more people.
Lose the thread
A series with a complex and changing plot will require a long time of concentration, since it is possible that with only two minutes of distraction with our mobile they can make us lose the thread of history. Therefore, it is possible that Netflix resorts to more dialogues or situations that serve to continually remember the viewer what happens, although this takes naturalness or realism to the work.
In the end, what can happen is that some large streaming platforms end up sinning what so many have criticized traditional television: little enriching contents that only serve to passively disconnect after work, which require very little of the mind of the audience .
What it is about is to avoid at all costs that the viewer turns off the screen. The same goes for social networks; Everything is worth keeping the user hooked. And to achieve this, there are many methods beyond simply trying to make quality content. The meme factor and virality also come into play, which seeks to bathe any series.
But none of this has to embody gravity as long as we continue to find variety in the catalog.
