Streaming Media and the Schools
For much of the past 70 years, broadcast television has been an important part of our daily lives. After a hard day’s work, people would go home for the evening and sit down with their favorite television show. The next morning at work, a show might be the topic of conversation with colleagues around the water cooler or coffee machine. It helped to reinforce a sense of community.
Public television first blossomed in this environment. Most stations devoted their daytime schedule to “in-school” programs—instructional video programs that were designed for teachers to show in their classrooms on topics that ranged across the curriculum and grade levels. Back in those days, I worked for WPSU (then WPSX), which offered a full-day schedule of instructional programs throughout the school year and produced instructional programs like What’s in the News, a public affairs program for middle-grade students, and Investigative Science for Elementary Education, which demonstrated physical phenomena for students to study. The in-school service thrived for three decades, but waned when videocassettes made it possible for teachers to record programs and then show when it was most convenient for them and their students. Soon after, DVDs allowed schools to create their own instructional video libraries.
Another change was the rise of cable television in the 1970s. Now, viewers had more channels to choose from, including channels that could only be viewed if one had a cable subscription. MTV and CNN are two examples. The increased number of channels meant that work colleagues were less likely to have had the same TV experience the night before.
Now, we are experiencing a new revolution in our viewing habits as TV channels replace their old broadcast schedules with streaming services. CNN has reported that in July 2023, “linear TV” (i.e., broadcast or cablecast programs) “made up less than half of all TV viewing,” according to the TV polling company Nielsen. Meanwhile, the report continues, “. . . streaming services, such as Netflix and YouTube, grew last month to a record high of 38.7% of all total TV watching.” While some streamed series are still scheduled on a weekly basis, the fact that they are streamed means that, within that week, viewers may watch the program at any time. In some cases, whole series are available, so that viewers can binge watch a 13-part series in a few days, rather than wait for 13 weeks for the story to end.
Streaming has some interesting implications, though, for K-12 instructional uses. In a streaming environment all students could view programs at the best time for them. It also means that their parents have equal access to the programs and could help students learn from them.
As streaming becomes more accepted by teachers, parents, and students, we could, I hope, see a resurgence of instructional media in our schools and a new role for public television to help schools use television as an. Instructional tool.
While another innovation—artificial intelligence—is grabbing the headlines these days, we should not overlook the power of streaming media to enrich the educational environment.
