Television, it is no exaggeration to recall, is the bedrock of Quebec culture. His seat. Television is the main vector of our popular culture. However, this base is crumbling. The vector weakens and the culture with it.
Posted at 7:15 a.m.
Yes, I know, there are still, on a daily basis, a million and a half people who watch District 31 on the “small screen”. But as my colleague Hugo Dumas rightly pointed out, will we see such a phenomenon again anytime soon?
I was reading the report of another colleague, Luc Boulanger, this week, about digital platforms which are now more popular than traditional TV. Although I told myself that it was inevitable, I thought that collectively, we were perhaps still minimizing the impact of this paradigm shift.
Subscriptions to online platforms exceed for the first time in Quebec those of traditional TV, we learned this week from a survey by the Academy of Digital Transformation (ATN) of Laval University, conducted last October. Among respondents, 71% subscribe to at least one paid online viewing service, compared to 66% to a cable or fiber optic television service (down 13% since 2018).
No wonder the giant Netflix, with a subscription rate of 57%, dominates all the others (Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Crave, etc.). The most popular Quebec platforms, Club illico (16%) and ICI Tou.tv’s Extra (9%), come far behind.
Unsurprisingly, the younger you are, the less you subscribe to cable or fiber optics. While 75% of people aged 55 and over have a traditional TV subscription, only 53% of 18-34 year olds are still cabled, Luc Boulanger tells us.
Finding myself between these age groups, at the end of my forties, I often wonder why I pay for a subscription to a bouquet of cable channels, so much I catch up on the digital platforms of Télé-Québec, Illico, Noovo or ICI Tou .tv what interests me. I rarely attend a show when it first airs. The main exception being live sports.
I am far from being an exception, if I believe the polls. My teenagers, like the majority of young Quebecers, have abandoned traditional television. They may have been brought up with blows of Knock Knock knock and have discovered The parents on their own initiative (on YouTube), today, there is almost no Quebec television content reaching them. They’re not the only ones, either.
Even if it means passing for a nationalist canon, I admit that I find that disturbing. Precisely because I have always considered television to be the transmission tool par excellence of Quebec culture. How will this transmission take place in the future?
The times are changing. My sons no longer find themselves on Quebec television. Neither do their friends. She’s not even on their radar. Children’s programs seem to them to be aimed at younger people and “adult” programs often present them in a caricatural way.
At their age, although strongly Americanized myself, I never missed an episode of Scoop or some Daughters of Caleb. They have no attachment to anything equivalent. They identify more readily with characters from Spanish, Korean, French or (of course) American series. Today, the show that seems to unite their generation the most is OD. How not to be sorry?
I came to rejoice when Fiston tells me about the Quebec youtubers he frequents (I who have already been guilty of putting all youtubers in the same basket). And to listen at his suggestion to the delusions of Mayor of Laval or the sketches of Anas Hassouna. There is also a hilarious one about a disconnected adult talking to students…
No need for a survey to confirm it: digital platforms are taking up more and more space. We won’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. But how to ensure that Quebec culture does not become the poor relation of this revolution?
I do not claim that my children are representative of their generation or of the population in general, but I often hear this discourse of indifference towards Quebec television, from young people aged 14 to 34, so as not to be reassured.
The most popular platforms don’t care much about local content. There are Quebec series and films on Netflix, for example, but they are not highlighted. You have to search to find them.
The steamroller of American culture has never been more crushing. National televisions are increasingly threatened. The recent worldwide successes of Squid Game (South Korea), The casa de papel (Spain) or Lupine (France) are the exceptions that confirm the rule.
This rule, more than ever, is that the audiovisual sector is dominated by American content. In the past, the United States mainly had the international stranglehold on popular cinema. From now on, the hegemony of American TV is just as important as that of Hollywood.
As a result, our specificity wanes. Our cultural exception too, in all the forms of its expression (cinema, music, etc.). Digital platforms have a lot to do with it.
I worry about the rest of the long-term effect of the pandemic on our culture. New consumption habits have been, if not created, at least reinforced. It happens at home.
“It will be difficult to undo these habits and get people out, after the pandemic, declared this week to Luc Boulanger the spokesperson for ATN investigations and specialist in new technologies Bruno Guglielminetti. It may require a lot of work on the part of the cultural community to attract people to their events outside. »
It is also likely to require a lot of work to ensure the sustainability of our television, and everything that stems from it more broadly. Our culture depends on it.