A news program has opinions, news items (which might contain locations, types of events etc), issues, methods of finding out more. A news story itself might be part of a bigger feature, which has related stories, or they may be stories that are part of a larger story.
A reality TV show has characters, backstories, histories.
A soap has a long history, family trees.
A comedy show has sketches.
A cooking show has recipes, chefs, locations, influences.
TV shows often have their own undefined ontology. A semantic markup that isn't marked up. Some are similar, some are very different.
Currently, TVs largely ignore these ontologies.
The web loves ontologies like this and when designing TV show websites, agencies (us included) agonise over these ontologies. Because that's what will inform the information architecture of the site.
Now, on TV (the 10' experience) do these ontologies matter?
On the web (the 2' experience) they matter because people interact with the web, they play about, poke about and hunt for stuff.
But the 10' experience isn't like that. People are in passive mode and there's often more than one user at a time. This makes interactivity considerably less desirable. In this sense, the less discovery and interaction, the better. TV viewers want to feed their eyeballs. They don't want to work.
So, do these ontologies matter at all then?
Because if they don't then TV isn't going to change very much at all.
