The Digital Transformation of the Basque Public Television: New Audiences and OTTs

Abstract

The aim of this research is to analyze the digital transformation of the Basque Public Radio and Television (EITB) to face declining audiences and the competition of streaming platforms. The Basque television has witnessed the digitization process of the European Union and the loss of protagonism of traditional television due to the arrival of Over-The-Top platforms. Public Service Media (PSM) in Spain, including the Basque Public Television, have lost almost half of their audiences since 2004. In order to survive and target new audiences, the Basque Television has been forced to adopt different multiplatform and distribution strategies and focus on digital contents. What are the digital innovations implemented by the Basque Television? Have they been able to stop the audience drain? What results have been achieved by the new multiplatform and distribution initiatives? To answer these questions, this research analyzes data of social media and mobile applications, and the creation of the new EITB’s OTT Primeran. This work concludes that the Basque Television’s social media and mobile apps have experienced a significant increase of users, but audiences have not fully recovered and the competition of OTT platforms continues.

1. Introduction

The consumption of online video in Over-the-top (OTT) platforms in Spain has been on the rise since the arrival of Netflix in 2015. Today, eight out of every ten Spaniards (about 37 million people) have access to an OTT. The platforms with the highest number of subscribers are YouTube (69%), Amazon Prime Video (60%), Netflix (57%), Disney+ (37%), HBO (36%), and RTVE Play (the OTT of the Spanish Public Television) [1, 2]. The influx of OTTs (media services offered directly to viewers via the Internet, bypassing cable, broadcast and satellite television) has consolidated the liberalization of the Spanish media market within a context of progressive deregulation and increasing concentration of media in a few conglomerates. This situation has caused a strong competition between traditional content creators and young entrepeneurs who can understand their audiences better through datafication and platformization of culture [3, 4, 5]. Streaming platforms have also changed the consumption patterns, since audiences can access online video contents atawad, the acronym for anytime, anywhere, and with any device [6].

OTTs have had their highest outreach among young audiences, who are moving away from traditional television and turning to other screens and formats. It’s a trend that has been coined by some authors as the ‘youthification’ [7] of television and it relies on multiplatform technology and social networks. Spanish youngsters between the ages of 16 and 24 prefer to watch online videos downloaded from the Internet and social media, or through subscription to OTT platforms such as Netflix or HBO. Some studies have found a more intense and ritual use of screens by college students around sleeping time, due to unconscious rather than instrumental habits, in order to escape from academic routines and relax [8].

The increase access to smartphones is leading to a more intense and omnipresent use of online apps and streaming services at a younger age. Spanish children between the ages of 6 and 13 engage daily with an average of seven mobile devices, mostly tablets, game consoles and smartphones. Children in Spain get their first smartphone at the age of 11 or 12. Those between the ages of 7 and 12 watch a daily average of 3.6 hours of online video, mostly on YouTube with tablets. Even at a younger age, kids between 3 and 6 watch daily an average of 3.4 hours of online video, mostly on YouTube and YouTubeKids, in the company of adults. In fact, many public television channels regard children as strategic and active audiences key for their survival [9, 10, 11, 12, 13]. Within these trends, youthification is the attempt of the television industry to win back preteen and teen publics with innovative narrative, aesthetic, and distribution strategies [14].

Since young people are abandoning linear television, channels try to adapt to the new market by opening new windows such as social networks, mobile applications, or YouTube. Some television channels in Spain are already connecting through YouTube with the fandom of their programs, specially talent and reality shows. Social networks like TikTok have equally influenced the way of telling news in a casual atmosphere defined by hashtags, challenges and sound tagging [15]. The media industry wants to reengage young audiences relying on global platforms and new liaisons, tailoring content and storytelling techniques to youth’s preferences, and building on audience data and insight. In order to attract the Spanish youth and compete directly with OTTs, three Spanish television channels decided to launch the platforms Flooxer and MTMAD (free of charge and ad-supported) and Playz (advertising free, part of the public channel RTVE), between 2015 and 2017. They offer webseries, transmedia and interactive projects (mostly Playz), reality shows, and influencer channels, and they are increasingly growing popularity in social media, especially in TikTok [16, 17, 18, 19, 20].

The Over-the-top (OTT), Subscription Video on Demand (SVoD), Transaction Video on Demand (TVoD, based on sale or rent of video), or Broadcast Video on Demand (BVoD, free and financed by public funds, license fee or ads) platforms take us to the concept of platformization, which could be defined as the “penetration of economic, governmental, and infrastructural extensions of digital platforms into the web and app ecosystems, fundamentally affecting the operations of media industries and production practices [21].” Based on the long-tail business model, OTTs compensate their low subscription prices using advertising as a complement to a good product placement strategy [22]. Platforms have disrupted the basic principles of traditional television because they don’t need a license, they are not constrained by geographic, social or cultural parameters because they have a global distribution, they aren’t bound by a linear daily and hourly programming grid or by political and advertising pressures, they measure audiences with big data, and they can personalize their offer through algorithms. But contents need to reach optimal audience results to continue in the platforms, and the competition among them is fierce after the streaming wars began in 2019, having reached a point of many cancellations and even loss of expected profits [23, 24]. According to Scolari [25], during the streaming wars platforms took on a centripetal model that led them to offer exclusive contents and services and at the same time engage in data mining with the personal information of their subscribers.

The transformations of the media market and its traditional players after the irruption of OTTs have propelled the debate over the concept of media itself. Today platforms like Netflix, Spotify or YouTube do not only exercise control over the content they aggregate through their moderation policies and recommendation algorithms, but also produce a wide range of original audiovisual content [26].

Due to the dominant platformization of culture and society, the old traditional cultural intermediaries are losing the centrality of their role. Public service media have had to face declining audiences and fight with digital platforms for viewers’ attention and cultural influence with different strategies, ranging from complacency and resistance to the distinction of their content offerings across new platforms, including production collaborations with other OTTs [26, 27]. As a result, several European public media outlets have already turned to the mobile screen culture with the creation of SVoD services (Streamz by the VRT Flemish public broadcaster), a BVoD seven-day catch-up service in the UK (the BBC iPlayer), and new channels such as the ‘funk’ network by the ARD and ZDF German public broadcasters, among others. In this last case, German public media have incorporated social media platforms in the production and distribution of content specifically geared to young audiences with the approval of the new Interstate Media Treaty, which regulates the rights and obligations of digital platforms to subject them to the control of German state media authorities since 2020. In the United Kingdom, BVoD services coexist with SVoD services like the ITV’s Britbox. Other European public channels have joined forces to take on the transnational streaming platforms. It is the case of The European Alliance formed by Germany’s ZDF, France Télévisions and Italy’s RAI, and Spain’s LovesTV, which is a new HbbTV (Hybrid Broadcast Broadband TV) seven-day catch up service launched by the Spanish public RTVE and private channels Atresmedia and Mediaset [28, 29, 30].

The underlying question is the maintenance of public service values in the partnerships between public service and private OTTs. According to Raats [31], a partnership agenda could be problematic if the reasons for public service media to partner with private players are not tied to the goals of plurality, quality, trust, diversity and innovativeness of content. Other authors dispute whether platforms developed by public service media respect the public values subscribed in the contracts that those media have signed with their governments [26], or consider that the private-public partnerships could pose a risk to the particularity of public service media as contributors to national culture [27].

The goal of this chapter is precisely to describe the multiplatform strategy of the Basque Public Radio and Television (EITB) to cater to young audiences, particularly in the Basque language, and EITB’s creation of a new OTT that has included a full range of Basque audiovisual contents, in addition to its own media production. The Basque Public Radio and Television offer news and entertainment in Basque and Spanish languages in five television channels (ETB1, ETB2, ETB3, ETB4 and ETB Basque), six radio stations (Euskadi Irratia, Gaztea, Radio Euskadi, Radio Vitoria, EITB Musika and EITB Euskal Kantak), a webpage (eitb.eus), a BVoD (EITB Nahieran), seven mobile applications for smartphones and Smart TVs, and social media profiles in Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Telegram.

2. EITB’s multiplatform initiatives for new audiences

EITB is undergoing a profound digital transformation process that had its turning point in 2020 when the corporation merged its business units of radio, television and internet under EITB Media, and conducted a transversal restructuring to coordinate the content production. This process took place in the aftermath of the Digital Single Market, adopted by the European Union in 2015 to unify the 27 national digital markets and facilitate cross-border online activity [32]. Public media have to combine the challenges of digitization with the need to redefine their public service mandate in a scenario of increasing platformization and individual rather than collective media habits. Within this context, the European Broadcasting Union and its members have pledged to six core values for Public Media Service: universality, independence, excellence, diversity, accountability and innovation [33, 34].

Children and teens have been the target audience as part of EITB’s public service duty since its foundation in 1982. The offer of digital contents and services in new platforms, specially in the Basque language, and geared to children and teens, is one of the twelve priorities in EITB 2030 Strategy. EITB acknowledges in this strategy that the “loss of emotional connection with the youth” [35] is one of the five challenges that it needs to face in order to improve its public service, because Basque youth between the ages of 18 and 29 mostly consume digital media, specially YouTube followed by subscription platforms.

2.1 Digital contents for children

The first digital community for children in EITB was born in 2001, but in 2011 all the entertainment contents for children were grouped in the webpage of the new community Hiru 3 (today 3Kluba). Between 2016 and 2019 EITB created the Hiru3 mobile application for smartphones and tablets and the Hiru3TB application for Smart TVs. In 2020, the new YouTube channel for 3Kluba opened, and today has 10,000 subscribers and 2,200 videos. All the child-oriented contents (in the Basque language) can also be seen in other platforms: ETB3 TV channel, the web of 3Kluba (https://www.eitb.eus/eu/hiru3/), and the BVoD seven-day catch-up service EITB Nahieran both in the web (https://www.eitb.eus/es/nahieran) and in the mobile app. Since 2020 some children’s programs have been broadcast simultaneously in ETB3 and the web eitb.eus.

The app 3Kluba is the cornerstone of the corporation’s multiplatform strategy for children’s audiences because of its options, functionalities and contents. The app divides the contact for three age brackets (0 to 4, 5 to 7, and from 8-year-olds forward), and a drop down menu allows users to go to the web of 3Kluba, store favorite contents, become members of the children’s club, and issue parental alerts. All the cartoons have a clickable icon that shows the values held by 3Kluba, as part of EITB’s public mandate (the importance of the Basque language, entertainment, knowledge, culture, friendship, and cooperation). The number of users for the app 3kluba has grown 12% from 2019 to 2022, from 47,637 to 53,384, but only in one year, from 2019 to 2020, the users increased by 86%. The multiplatform strategy of 3Kluba also includes interactive games in its webpage. The contents for children amounted to 63% of all the youth-oriented contents in 2020 [36].

2.2 New formats and transmedia projects for the youth

In 1990 EITB started the first public music radio station for young audiences in the Basque language, with regional coverage in the Basque Country. In the last three decades Gaztea (Young) has evolved into a multiplatform and multiscreen brand in constant expansion, with new formats and transmedia projects in its web (https://eitb.eus/eu/gaztea/) and in social media (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok). As a brand for Basque youth, Gaztea has incorporated webseries of its own production about different topics since 2018. One of the latest webseries, Daniel|A, was developed in 2021 as a transmedia project on the issue of gender identity through the story of a college Basque girl. Daniel|A was broadcast simultaneously in the web eitb.eus and in Gaztea’s YouTube channel, and the story also expanded as a podcast in EITB’s podcasting platform. The last scenes were recorded in a real concert with one of the actresses, who is a singer, and the audience was chosen in an Instagram contest. A new webseries, Beita (Bait), about a sexual assault within a group of friends, was released in Gaztea’s YouTube channel in June of 2023 and it has its soundtrack in Spotify.

Along with the webseries, Gaztea has launched innovative formats in Basque language such as video podcasts with debates on current youth issues (Yoko Ona) and surf (Lay Day), as well as a sociality (a reality show with a social media format) featuring Basque college students doing the Erasmus European exchange program in different countries [37].

In addition, the flagship of EITB’s youth fiction series Goazen (Let’s go), featured as a movie in 2009, is on its 10^th season in ETB1 in 2023. According to EITB, in 2022 the 9^th season of this group of youngsters in a summer camp reached 32% of share in the age bracket of 4 to 12-year-olds. Goazen is another transmedia project that expands the story to its own mobile application (with more than 230,000 users in 2019, two years after its launch), magazines, promotion concerts and theater plays, audiobooks, magazines, songs in Spotify, and merchandising. Goazen has collaborated with the Basque regional government in campaigns to visibilize sexual diversity and against domestic violence [38, 39]. Another successful youth fiction series in ETB1 is Irabazi Arte (To victory), about a young women’s soccer team. Its season premieres have appeared simultaneously in ETB1 and the web eitb.eus, and the series expands to podcasts with interviews of real soccer women players and songs in Spotify. Irabazi Arte also has related episodes with interactive comic contents in the Komiki App. Users scroll down text and audiovisual contents and can answer quizzes as they go through each episode. The latest project geared to youth is a musical webseries named Itsatsita (Stuck), released in September of 2023. Based on a successful theater play in Spain, this webseries includes 90-second episodes in Instagram and TikTok with humorous stories about the intimate encounters of a young couple. All the episodes will be compiled in a movie and incorporated in EITB’s new OTT platform [40].

2.3 Social media and mobile applications

In line with its strategic plans from 2016 to 2020, EITB remodelates the web eitb.eus, improves the design of the mobile apps for children and youth, and coordinates the distribution of contents in the web, social media, and digital platforms. The followers in EITB’s Twitter, YouTube and Instagram have increased, but Instagram followers have almost triplicated, from 90,587 in 2019 to 263,163 in 2022 (see Table 1).

Seguidores en redes sociales
	2019	2020	2021	2022
Facebook	915,051	950,547	983,914	915,119
Twitter	539,854	586,143	636,039	668,437
YouTube	466,521	619,294	740,594	824,310
Instagram	90,587	156,196	226,706	263,163

Table 1.

Annual followers of EITB’s social media.

Source: Own elaboration with data provided by EITB [41].

YouTube followers have experienced a considerable growth (76%), which could be explained by the simultaneous multiplatform premieres of some webseries, reality shows, programs and contests in television, the web eitb.eus and YouTube. Twitter followers have grown almost 24%, and Facebook followers have practically remained the same.

Mobile applications geared to children (3kluba) and youth (Gaztea) also show a rising trend (see Table 2). The app 3kluba has gained 12% of users from 2019 to 2022, and in the same period the number of users of the app Gaztea (which only has music) has gone up by almost 50% (from 12,469 in 2019 to 18,498 in 2022).

Usuarios anuales de las apps
	2019	2020	2021	2022
EITB	242,166	301,398
EITB Albisteak			345,913	349,321
EITB Nahieran			339,334	456,246
Goazen	230,243	224,862	235,416	232,820	+1%
3 Kluba	47,637	88,689	73,123	53,384	+12%
Gaztea	12,469	16,934	19,326	18,498	+48%

Table 2.

Annual users of EITB’s mobile applications.

Source: Own elaboration with data provided by EITB [41].

The app Goazen grew from zero to 230,000 users in its first two years from 2017 to 2019, but it has only increased 1% from 2019 to 2022. The most significant changes have occurred with the app EITB, which gathered mostly news and was operative from 2014 to 2020. In 2021 the new app EITB Albisteak (News) replaced the app EITB, and EITB Nahieran (On demand) became the first EITB app with only free on demand and audio and video streaming. It has a vertical scroll down interface (similar to its web version) and includes all the television and radio contents already broadcast in the radio and television channels for the current and past seasons, at times going back several years. The app also integrates live streaming for three of the five television channels (ETB1, ETB2 and ETB Basque) and live streaming for all six radio stations. It is offered in Spanish and in the Basque language, and allows setting favorite contents and alerts. It doesn’t contain advertising and is funded publicly, as part of the EITB corporation. As Table 2 shows, EITB Nahieran has added 34% new users from 2021 to 2022, just one year after its launch.

3. Primeran: the project of a Basque OTT

The project of a Basque OTT as a “Basque Netflix” was announced by EITB’s director, Andoni Aldekoa, at a control commission of the Basque Parliament (the legislative branch of the Basque regional government) in May of 2021. The Basque OTT would include not only EITB’s contents, but also the audiovisual productions originated in the Basque Country to promote the Basque culture and language [42]. Aldekoa said at the commission: “We don’t want to enter the platform scenario to compete with the private sector. We want a platform forged by the Basque society through EITB. We have to be realistic and honest. We are not going to compete with the large-scale productions of Netflix or Amazon Prime. But we believe we have to offer that content if we want the youth, mostly the youth, to consume media contents in Basque [43].” Also in May of 2021, EITB signed an agreement with internet operator Euskaltel to offer the Euskalteka, a free catch-up catalog with 300 hours of programs, but limited to the operator’s subscribers. In 2022, EITB and Amazon Prime Video reached a deal to distribute series, movies and gastronomic documentaries in this transnational platform. In September of 2023, the Spanish platform Movistar+ agreed to include almost 300 hours of EITB’s contents.

EITB’s OTT strategy is framed within the contracts periodically signed between the corporation and its public funder, the Basque regional government, in this case for the period of 2022 to 2025 [44]. The new OTT, named Primeran, is aligned with EITB’s public service commitment to produce and provide audiovisual contents in accordance with the sociocultural and linguistic identities of its public. This OTT will be accompanied by Makusi (a children’s game), a platform with content geared to young audiences.

Primeran is also part of EITB 2030 strategy, which positions the corporation as a public broadcasting group with platforms (online video services, applications), channels (television, radio, web) and windows (social media), in alliance with associations of independent film-makers in the Basque Country, and with the goal of increasing the original versions in the Basque language [35]. In 2022, EITB participated in the production of several Basque movies. The new media habits tied to the constant rise of the video on demand (VOD) in Europe are driving the corporation’s OTT initiatives. In ten years, between 2010 and 2020, the VOD market in the European Union triplicated its revenues, mostly due to subscriptions, along with increased broadband penetration and digitization of content. At the end of 2020, more than 140 million European households were subscribed to these VOD services, a trend accelerated by the arrival of Netflix and Amazon Prime in 2012 [45]. In the Basque Country, seven out of every ten consumers pay for one or two streaming platforms [35]. Primeran is expected to reach out to two million visitors a year with streaming of video on demand and live streaming of radio and television through Smart TVs, mobile devices, the web, streaming devices of Amazon Fire TV, Android TV and Apple TV, and HbbTV [46, 47]. The platform became available in mid-September of 2023 in primeran.eus and it can be accessed to after a free registration. Primeran has more than 3,000 available contents, mostly in the Basque language or dubbed into the Basque language, that go from movies and documentaries to sports, cuisine, music and children’s programs. Some of the contents will be created exclusively for Primeran, which has its own aggregator and recommender system, among other functionalities [48].

4. Conclusions

As many other PSM in Spain and Europe, EITB has had to adapt to platformization to face the competition of transnational streaming platforms and try to capture young audiences who don’t consume linear television. This is not an easy challenge, given the magnitude of the VOD revenues and the rising number of subscribers in Europe, but also the declining audiences of public media. Between 2008 and 2022, regional public service media in Spain lost 35% of their audiences, and EITB lost 26% in the same period. Audiences of the Basque television reached an all-time low in 2014, with a share of 9.6%, almost half of the share in 2008 (17.9%) [49].

While the reasons for the audience loss are complex, the Basque public media corporation has decided to implement different multiplatform and distribution strategies to control the audience drain and keep up with the monopoly of transnational platforms. EITB’s strategy has focused on a differential target (young audiences) and differential contents (about the Basque Country and preferably in the Basque language) in order to serve a niche that the main platforms don’t cater to, and at the same time be committed to its public service mandate.

Platformization can enable PSM to fulfill their public mission in the digital age if it’s formulated as a structural dimension with algorithms that ensure accessibility, plurality of opinions, content diversity, and equal opportunities for communication in the mutual relationship between the public media and their users on third-party platforms [28]. This remains to be seen, but a first regulatory step was taken by the European Union with the Audiovisual Media Services Directive in 2018. Accordingly, VOD service providers would contribute to the production of European works through a tax-based financial contribution for a fund geared to support independent audiovisual works [50].

The creation of the new OTT Primeran is at the heart of EITB’s efforts to incorporate platformization in its new digital strategies, but the OTT needs to be fully developed to see its results. The social media and the new mobile apps started by EITB have had visible outcomes and the number of followers are on the rise, which could be explained by the new webseries, video podcasts and transmedia projects. Yet, digital audiences are difficult to measure, and the competition for viewers is a long-term struggle, despite a slight improvement of EITB’s television audiences (particularly ETB2, mostly in Spanish) since 2021, from 10.8% to 13.1% of share.

Thanks

The author of this chapter wants to thank Carmina Crusafon, journalism professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), for her moral support throughout the preparation and publication of different works related to the digitization of the Basque Public Radio and Television. The author participated in the research project Los retos de la televisión pública en España ante el Mercado Único Digital europeo: Estrategias multipantalla, innovación y renovación de los mandatos del servicio público (The challenges of public television in Spain in the European Digital Single Market: Multiscreen strategies, innovation and renovation of the public service mandates), financed by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities of Spain (2018–2021).