Muhammad Musa

The crisis of the Corona virus shook the media in Europe, as it did in other entertainment sectors such as cinema and theater. The production of most TV shows and series was stopped, and the filming of TV series and series was postponed indefinitely, but the media remains the most fortunate sector.

The news programs, which are depicted in the studios of television stations, have undergone major fundamental changes, as they have stopped hosting the audience in the studio, and the number of technicians and guests in the same places has been determined at the same time, to respond to the numbers allowed by the governments of each European country for public gatherings, And to reduce the spread of the virus.

The luckiest media
The Corona virus was not a concern for the media, especially for television stations. The number of viewers of television programs since the crisis began reached high levels that small screens have not known for decades. And eager for new news and entertainment from a wide audience sitting today at home, rising at levels parallel to the development of the crisis.

And of course, we have to wait for the commercials numbers that have been broadcast on various media during the past few weeks, the future prospects for ads, and the ability of the media to attract the advertiser if the crisis persists for months to come, to be able to link the time of Corona with advertising revenue.

The Internet also suffered from unprecedented pressure from users, one of the reasons being directed by a large European audience to watch the entertainment materials provided by "Streming" companies, whether they are intercontinental or local. This prompted the American company Netflix to reduce the quality in which its films and series provide its services, in order to ensure a fair and good quality distribution of its entertainment material to all users around the world.

Stops programs and series
As is the case with the sports and artistic events that were all postponed due to the crisis, it is no longer strange to hear news about stopping filming of programs and iconic television series. Some small European screens cannot be imagined without them, such as "EastEnders", which is shown four times in The week on BBC TV, which has been filmed, has been suspended. Note that this series has been running without interruption since 1985.

The British Channel 4 also postponed filming the famous program "The Great British Bake Off", which was scheduled to start last week, despite the news that spread in the media in recent days, confirming that filming the program will continue, because its nature and location of its filming is not A large technical team is required.

safety first
It is clear that European TV stations do not want to risk the safety of their employees or their guests, especially since ambiguity still surrounds the ways of the spread of corona or methods of infection from it, so these stations took a packet of firm decisions a lot, such as determining the distance between guests in the studio, and between the presenters of the programs themselves .

The channels also required its employees who go outside to prepare reports from there, to observe certain controls, such as the use of microphones with long arms when conducting dialogues between them and those who talk to them to ensure the distance of one and a half meters recommended by medical authorities.

Television stations have also used telecommunications methods as never before. It is no longer strange for a news program to interview all its guests from their homes through computer screens.

It has become customary for many news programs to display reports filmed by non-professional people from their surroundings, due to the difficulties of movement and movement of television teams in some European countries due to government measures.

Longing for an earlier time
Despite the flexibility and the successful interaction of many European public television channels in Britain, the Netherlands and Belgium with the crisis, the length of the latter will put these stations in front of major problems in the coming months, and after it will soon run out of stock of programs that ended production before Corona came to our lives. This will leave large areas of TV hours free.

It seems that remodeling old TV material will be one of the solutions available, not only to fill the many hours of television, but to remind another time before the time of Corona, as did the official Dutch TV, which allocated hours of its broadcast to display TV material from the archive.

Dutch television officials opened the door to celebrities from the country, and to the public’s vote to choose the archival material they would like to see as part of a retransmission of old material.

Although a lot of archival material is freely available on YouTube and on Dutch TV sites, the demand for it nowadays in the Netherlands indicates the psychological need to watch TV with the whole family as a collective experience at this difficult time.

The news is in first place
Newsletters, talk shows, and news analysis have high viewership, reflecting the enormity of the global ordeal we are experiencing today, and the need to continuously follow the news.

According to figures released by the British Broadcasting Corporation, watch the 6 pm news bulletin, which was shown on the 18th of last March on the British television channel 1, 9 million viewers, the highest number of viewers for the channel since Christmas in 2008. The number also represents twice the number of viewers For the same newscast for the past year.

The pessimistic speech delivered by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on the 18th of the same month, in which he called on the British to be cautious, cautious and ready to bid farewell to their loved ones, attracted a total of 10 million viewers in Britain when it was shown on more than one television station there.

The BBC news channel had a very high viewership in Britain in the first two weeks of the crisis, as the channel reached 11.7 million viewers over the age of sixteen, to be the highest number of viewership since the Paris terrorist attacks in 2015.

On the same level, the follow-up in the Netherlands to television, and to news programs in particular, was significantly higher than the normal viewing rate. The average time to watch television in the Netherlands in the first two weeks of the Koruna crisis reached 225 minutes per day, according to the report of the Number Watching Organization in the Netherlands, to increase by 33 minutes from 2019.

Dutch news programs have attracted more than twice the audience than the numbers they used to watch in recent periods, as shown by the Dutch TV Watch Numbers report itself.

The number of TV viewers increases after five o'clock, that is, during the period when television stations start broadcasting their new news programs. The average viewership for this time period reached 7.1 million, in a precedent on Dutch TV stations.

The appetite for news was not limited to following television news programs, as the Internet was one of many sources of news. The famous and serious news sites accounted for high numbers of browsers, as the number of surfers, "BBC" news sites on the Internet on March 19, reached 29.2 million browsers in the United Kingdom alone, which represents a new record for these sites.