One of the world's leading trend in the media industry is convergence and Nigeria as a popular black nation has keyed into the trend to boost her content production, improve on revenue generation and by extension meet the need of a wider audience using technologies.
While the broadcast industry has continued to grapple with analogue transmission which is not immune to noise and various interferences, with convergence, feedback is immediate and noise is reduced as audience seek clarity where necessary.
The steady growth and expansion of the Nigerian broadcast media industry in the last century shows that the emergence of new media portends good omen for the industry as the traditional broadcast media are now compelled to step up their operations and embrace the new trend in reaching out to the audience through the use of the new media.
Media Convergence is a blend of several forms of new media, which results in the transformation of each converging entity, as well as the creation of new entities. Some forms of media that exist today in Nigeria are as a result of innumerable small-scale convergences that have occurred frequently throughout time.
Now, it is a norm in Nigeria for a television station to develop a website that contains some of its programs, video segments and life streaming broadcasts. For instance NTA, AIT, Channels TV and TVC to mention but few have their YouTube channels, mobile applications, eyewitness packages, and stream Live among other packages. The wind of change in the deployment of new media has also taken the Print media by storm as Newspaper outfits also offer video segments on their websites. Some of these outfits in Nigeria that are readily exploring the vast array of possibilities offered by new media include, This day, Daily Trust, Vanguard, The Guardian Newspapers, The Nation and The Punch Newspapers.
Broadcast radio stations are also not left out of the 21st century broadcast trend as they now offer live streaming of activities real time Live events on radio. This has made it possible for viewers to bond with not only their most cherished programs but also with their favourite On Air Personalities (AOP) or show from every part of the world.
New media emerge gradually from the evolution of older forms to meet changing environmental needs, and the new forms in turn influence the ongoing development of older ones, which most adapt to survive.
In Nigeria, some broadcast media organizations are doing well and taking adequate advantage of the global trend of media convergence to make extra funds for their organizations as millions of viewers or listeners on their website attract local and international advertisers to the platform.
News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) for instance, is a medium that sends breaking news to cell phones, publish stories on their website with photographs and audio. This is the convergence of a form of person-to-person communication with a mass medium.
Within the broadest definition of the term, some broadcast stations are known to have magazines that qualify as forms of multimedia because they convey information through a blend of written words, photography, and graphics, displayed on a paper medium and videos, example of such is the NTA TV Guide.
Though some broadcast media in Nigeria are faced with the challenge of meeting up with the technologies needed to converge, there is an imminent dearth of some existing media. Even some local media for instance are yet to key into the trend, media forms and the people who produce them are being forced to critically examine their strengths in order to build on them.
For instance, the trend is not far-fetched from the global village which the world is and when external pressures are applied and new innovations are introduced, each form of communication media is affected by an intrinsic self-organizing process that spontaneously occurs within the system.
Despite the launch of a pilot of the digital switch over on the 30th April 2016, some media organization in that zone couldn’t meet up due to the digital technologies needed to switch over.
By
Magdalene Michael
P15SSMM8013
Department of Mass Communication
Faculty of Social Sciences
Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria.
Thank You
ReplyDelete