Big Data and Television Broadcasting. A Critical Reflection on Big Data’s Surge to Be-come a New Techno-Economic Paradigm and its Impacts on the Concept of the «Ad-dressable Audience

The paper explores how big data creates challenges and opportunities to enhance value relationships be-tween TV broadcasters, audiences and advertisers in digital television broadcasting. It finds that research into big data requires much closer attention to critical issues in the social and cultural sciences – with a fo-cus on media and communication studies and its subfield media management – to inspire our understand-ing that big data would perfectly fit the dominant «techno-economic paradigm», a meta-narrative for a substantial technological revolution that has the power to bring about a transformation across the board in ways that when new technologies diffuse, they multiply their impact across the economy and eventually modifies the socio-institutional structures. While asking how big data adds value to a broadcaster’s decision on corporate strategies in Big-Data driven TV is legitimate and important, we remain skeptical as to what effectively is to be gleaned from big data in broadcast TV This is because the socio-cultural dimensions are greatly unresolved. Notably, the corporate strategies of the «addressable audience» or audience com-modification, whereby audiences are effectively sold as mere datacommodities to broadcasters and adver-tisers, must be observed critically.