On the screen, Juariu is watching the broadcast of the final of Big Brother. After five months (and a few more days) of confinement, Marcos Ginocchio from Salta leaves “the most famous house in the country”, turns off the lights and closes the most successful edition in the Argentine history of the reality show.
On Twitch, and simultaneously on YouTube, the woman from Tucuman cries when she sees the outcome of the program that she followed closely with a fundamental objective: to broadcast her reaction to those who chose to follow the cycle outside of the traditional TV offer.
In the studio, Diego Poggi, in charge of “turning on the stream” to follow the movements of the house at midnight, he moves between cameras, ex-participants and producers and shows the technical behind-the-scenes of the most watched and commented program in recent months. It also generates a new layer of content, another way to follow the event.
At this point, the phenomenon Big Brother It has surpassed, and by far, the limits of television. Social networks, led by Twitter, underpinned the massive success of this tenth version of the realitywhich had its correlate at the level streaming and proposed an oiled convergence of formats and platforms around the same content.
That the final of the program has added almost 400 thousand people (or connections) thanks to Twitch and YouTube is just the tip of the iceberg of a multiformat that, in the case of Telefe, already had previous experiences in The Argentine voice, Bake Off y MasterChef. Right now, and as part of the brand new edition of the reality culinary, the format confirms its momentum and growth. Everything indicates that this will be the norm for large-scale television content from now on.
New consumption rituals
In August 2021, when Lionel Messi became a PSG player and was presented in Paris, Ibai Llanos spoke exclusively with the footballer one-on-one after the event. The fact, which was added to a series of clashes between sports journalists and content creators via Twitch, was seen by many as a threat and raised the question of what could happen in traditional media from the growth of these new platforms massive consume. “We do different things that are going to coexist,” said the streamer vasco.
A little over a year and a half after that media debate, today the discussion is somewhat anachronistic. In addition to the fact that several audiovisual content platforms have established themselves as popular options on YouTube and Twitch (Luzu TV, Piso 18, República Z), the adaptation of traditional media to the content logic of networks and digital platforms has become more and more regular. The case of the Buenos Aires FM Urbana Play (broadcast on YouTube and whose slogan, “We are the radio you see”, says a lot about current times) is one of the most notable. But the trend of targeting this new transmedia consumption rituals expands further.
At the local level, the case of El Doce confirms the spirit of the times. The channel consolidated its YouTube channel as a space with its own support in the logic of the station, which today is thought of as a global brand and no longer exclusively as a television signal.
Soledad Oliva Mayor, coordinator of digital content, assures that it is part of the need to occupy spaces in these “new conversations” that take place outside of traditional media. “Here it does not happen that something engulfs the other, but that everything feeds back and expands. It is all possibilities in this convergence”, she raises. And she maintains by way of summary: “There is a feedback between the platforms and the networks, and the air,” she concludes in turn, Oliva Mayor from El Doce.
“Many of the contents are originally thought of in a transversal, transmedia way,” explains Oliva Mayor, who since 2018 has been in charge of developing the presence of El Doce in the largest video search engine worldwide, where it is close to reaching 500 videos. thousand subscribers.
“Regardless of what is seen on the air in the news, we already think of our own content from our YouTube channel, with its duration and its format, which will only be there. And obviously it is going to be complemented by what goes on the air, because we are trying to provide feedback from one side to the other ”, he assures.
In addition, it highlights that, far from what happened years ago, there is no longer a direct “dump” of what goes “on the air” to YouTube. “You work with your own language, with your own format. Even the same platform, which originally has a format more similar to television (16:9) is also adapting to the new consumptions that dominate today, such as the Instagram format”, he analyzes regarding the development of the so-called shorts on YouTube, small clips replicate the vertical axis posed by the characteristic format of cell phones and adjust to the dynamics of more agile content such as TikTok.
Promote direct contact
In recent months, El Doce has presented local programming that can be followed on DirectTV, on its website, and also on its YouTube channel. It is not an isolated initiative if one takes into account that in September 2022 Radio Televisión Argentina (RTA) announced with great fanfare the launch of original content from public media for Twitch and YouTube.
“We understood that these digital media are new business units for us, even though they are not in any organizational chart,” explained Rosario Lufrano, the head of RTA and well-remembered presenter of the evening edition of Telefe News between 1990 and 1998. “There is a whole generation that launched itself to say who they are, what they do and why, and they do it with a debauchery that perhaps we did not have at the time,” he stressed. “We are learning”, added Lufrano regarding this new paradigm of coexistence of formats, which led the State to think about its own audiovisual presence in the universe of streaming.
In this sense, he stressed the importance of direct contact with the public in this digital universe: “It is transversal. It is one more way to communicate and a platform that invites you to reach who you want or want. And ultimately, this continuous exchange makes that feedbackthe roundtrip of communication that we generally experienced as something much closer to the radio, have it in the chat”.
This contact is the one that decidedly exploited the host digital that followed Big Brother from Twitch and YouTube. “It was a beautiful experience precisely for being able to have such direct contact with the people she was looking at,” says Victoria Braier, better known as Juariu. “I used to come all day looking Big Brotherthen it was to turn on (the stream) to also know what the community thought, how they were experiencing it”, explains the person in charge of reacting to the galas of the reality, who highlights the level of debate that was generated with the audience. “I was waiting for that moment, they sent me audios saying things from different countries, different provinces,” she says.
In his turn, Diego Poggi (who, in addition to his digital role in Big Brother did the same in MasterChef Celebrity y The Argentine voice) points out how this convergence of platforms and formats makes it possible to generate more reach for the same product that was previously only available in one way.
According to the streamerthe contents of the reality on Twitch and YouTube they generated close to 100 million views during the last edition. Considering that all the content generated by Big Brother In social networks, it gathered more than 2.6 billion impressions. The conclusion seems to be that, ultimately, everything reinforces each other. “It’s great how one is changing from TV to the networks, from the networks to digital and whatever. It is a path that Telefe has been doing a lot, with different characters and betting on platforms. Open new channels and we are going to look for new audiences… It’s great, it’s a great goal, ”he summarizes.
Back and forth between formats
Guillermo Pendino, vice president of content and programming at Telefe, forcefully defines this dynamic of coexistence and complement. “We do not think of digital content as a derivative. We work on the concept of ecosystem, where the proposals are comprehensive and involve all the platforms, giving feedback to each other collaboratively”, he explains.
“Today, audiences are the ones who choose where, when and how to see the content. But they can even choose to enjoy it on multiple screens at the same time. For this reason, the route that the content has through the different platforms must be organic and functional”, Pendino points out regarding this ecosystem of media and formats that Telefe has been developing, and that has the Copa Libertadores as its next challenge.
Logically, what is seen in Big Brother It is the consequence of long-term sustained work. The channel, which is the Argentine medium with the most followers on Twitch and has already surpassed the 300,000 barrier, has experience when it comes to thinking of these platforms as allies and not as some kind of competition against what used to be the reign of open television.
“They were never potential enemies for us. On the contrary, I would tell you that we have always taken them as allies to enhance our reach. Strictly speaking, for many years now at Telefe we have incorporated digital platforms as part of our ecosystem”, explains Pendino, for whom the so-called “phenomenon Big Brother” is “the crowning of a strategy” promoted for a long time. And he argues: “Today it appears as a phenomenon, but it is a construction that we have made over time, learning a lot and trying to be at the forefront.”
In this sense, the executive illustrates the transmedia success of Big Brother from the case of Pluto TV, service of streaming free from the Paramount conglomerate through which the program could be followed 24 hours a day.
“In addition to being the most watched program of the last 9 years on open TV in Argentina, the phenomenon transcended television,” says Pendino. The numbers, once again, serve to measure a palpable growth in the way in which the social conversation around the subject takes place. “Our service of streaming free, Pluto TV, became the most downloaded free application in Argentina with seven million downloads, and the exclusive channel, Big Brother Live, is the most watched in the country and in the region”, sums up the manager. How is the movie called? Everything everywhere at the same time.