Television documentaries as spearheads in public service television: Comparing scheduling practices on the linear channels and video-on-demand services of Danish TV 2 and DR

Public service television companies are confronted with harsh competition from a growing number of “online natives”, as Johnson (2019) terms the transnational streaming service. As documented by Lobato (2019) in his analysis of Netflix, the American dominance of the transnational television industry prevails in the digital era. Findings from the European Audiovisual Observatory support these rather traditional patterns in the industry, showing that 54 per cent of the film and television content on subscription video-on-demand (SVoD) services available in Europe is of American origin (Grece & Pumares, 2019). Furthermore, content of British origin accounts for 55 per cent of the European content, dominating content of Danish (2%) and Swedish (3%) origin. Consequently, the degree of proximity in the content – in terms of geography and national contexts – is very low, and the political and cultural issues already in the circuit of the national and local media are not present in the content. Finally, the most popular online natives also tend to be rather monogeneric (i.e., fiction).

In this new marketplace for television content, public service television (PSTV) has a growing need to distinguish itself with an offer to the viewers that is not found on other services, or at least only found to a limited extent. To show how Danish PSTV tries to be distinctive, we compare how DR and Danish TV 2 schedule a genre traditionally associated with core public service (PS) programming – television documentaries – on their linear channels and their in-house video-on-demand (VoD) services. First, we argue that the two PS companies are trying to promote a kind of scheduling practice in which television documentaries (series as well as stand-alone documentaries) with high degrees of linguistic and national proximity are given editorial priority on linear channels as well as on the VoD services, even if the two companies have different profiles regarding the scale and scope of the genre. Included is a discussion of why this genre has been the focus of our study. Second, we argue that the new scheduling practices appropriated seem to support a merger of linear and non-linear modes of watching television, and not an either–or approach. This approach is shaping, as well as being supported by, viewer habits in the digital era, in which viewers tend to switch between linear and non-linear use of the television content.

In Denmark, 68 per cent of the population aged 12+ use streaming services on a weekly basis to access television content either for livestreaming or on demand (Agency for Culture and Palaces, 2021). The data from the PS companies on the use of their VoD and SVoD services is, however, not available to researchers. The time spent watching television content on demand is not counted for in the daily ratings measured by Kantar Gallup if this is done seven days after the linear broadcast or prior to the linear broadcast (e.g., as a preview). The data on the use of VoD and SVoD services is therefore extremely limited and is produced by the television companies themselves. Furthermore, the level of secrecy surrounding this data is high, regardless of the business model used by the companies.

We begin this article by presenting results from the emerging body of research on the development of PSTV scheduling in the digital era. In the second part, we present the findings from our comparative study of TV 2 and DR's scheduling practices for television documentaries, and we point at the somewhat paradoxical influence of the business models in Danish PSTV. Finally, we discuss our findings in the light of the competitive strategies presented by the two PSTV companies themselves.

The in-house VoD services are part of what is termed a front-door strategy in which they are positioned as the main entry points to PSTV content in the future. Taking the scheduling practices for television documentaries as an indicator of how the Danish PS companies will develop, this strategy might broaden the ways in which television content can be accessed by viewers, as well as extending their choices. The front-door strategy might be regarded as a new phase in the continued adaptation of PSTV to a changing television industry and new viewing habits.

Recent research into the current competitive environment in the television industry by Johnson (2019) points to the developments within the television companies as they try to adapt their modes of publishing to the digital era. These changes include using their in-house VoD services in different ways, and this effort has a profound influence on the traditional scheduling practices learned in the competitive multichannel television environment (Lassen, 2018). This rescheduling process has invoked scholarly interest, and empirically grounded contributions have investigated how PSTV companies curate their in-house VoD services. The important questions of if and how PSTV companies use algorithmic personalisation to inform the new curation and publication practices is highlighted in contributions by Sørensen and Hutchinson (2017) and revisited by Sørensen (2020). Other contributions to this new phase of empirically grounded scheduling studies are trying to understand how the interplay of linear channels and in-house VoD services pans out. In a study of the Norwegian public broadcasting company NRK and Norwegian TV2 by Spilker and colleagues (2020), the transition to scheduling is addressed by studying the way genres are made available on the linear channels and in-house VoD services. The findings show how the Norwegian PS companies NRK and TV2 each have implemented a kind of division-of-labour practice in which the VoD services publish fiction and the linear channels focus more on factual programming and entertainment. Even if NRK's strategy is rather unclear, this publishing strategy is, according to Spilker and colleagues (2020), addressing the competition from the transnational streaming companies in a problematic way: Since NRK is mainly targeting young segments of the audience and TV2 is trying to mirror the competitors, the core PS values of a mixed programme and universality will be at risk if this strategy is the future of PSTV (Spilker et al., 2020).

However, the Norwegian strategy is not mirrored in the Danish context. In Bruun's production study of how the interplay of linear channels and in-house VoD services impacts the scheduling practices at Danish PS company TV 2 (Bruun, 2021, 2020), the new practices are aimed at securing a mainstream audience for the VoD services, for economic as well as cultural-political reasons. According to Bruun's (2021) findings, at Danish TV 2, this transformation has an impact on what kind of content is being produced to secure the continued competitive role of the schedule for linear service as well as the VoD services. This new task supports the development of new scheduling practices and means that the schedulers are now focusing increasingly on demanding specific genres and new kinds of formats to support synergies of the linear channels and VoD services. This means that certain genres become more important than others for the purpose of attracting and keeping the audience. According to Bruun's findings, the kind of content that does well on both linear channels VoD services is fairly stable. The schedulers have learned that Danish-language fiction, Danish-language reality series, and Danish-language documentaries are of utmost importance for securing high ratings, and for the ability to retain the VoD subscribers at the same time, because the viewers tend to switch between linear and on-demand viewing of the same programmes (Bruun, 2021). This kind of knowledge about the synergy between the two modes of watching television is now informing scheduling practices. The lesson learned at TV 2 is that even if the professional tasks and skillsets acquired are changing, scheduling is still extremely important in the television industry (Bruun, 2021).

The content categories important to TV 2's publishing strategy and the focus on linguistic and national proximity to retain an audience of scale also seem to mark DR's practices. In their important and groundbreaking work, Kelly and Sørensen (2021) compare how content is made available over long periods of time at BBC iPlayer and DRTV. The results show that the curation of BBC iPlayer leads to a relatively small catalogue with an interface focused on already highly promoted programmes. In comparison, DRTV's catalogue is bigger, with a dynamic interface and scheduled in close coordination with the linear channels, and especially the mainstream channel DR1 (Kelly & Sørensen, 2021). DR's publishing strategies and the mainstream orientation of DRTV is also confirmed by the findings from an analysis of DRTV alone by Lassen and Sørensen (2021).

All in all, the differences between the publishing strategies among PS companies are remarkable, and even between PS companies on similar markets. The strategies of DR and Danish TV 2 stand out, and the question is how the efforts to produce synergy between the two modes of watching television and the focus on securing an audience of scale affect the scheduling practices of specific genres in detail. Furthermore, the question is whether these practices add a specific competitive distinctiveness to the PSTV profile of DR and TV 2, respectively.

Based on an analysis of the linear schedules and VoD front pages, we will conduct an in-depth examination of one of the genres traditionally regarded as important to the PS identity of a television company: television documentaries. Reaching an audience of some scale in the way the genre is produced and scheduled is therefore also politically important for DR and TV 2. As mentioned above, Bruun's (2021) analysis of the transformation of scheduling at TV 2 shows that Danish-language documentaries are helpful in the production of synergy between the two modes of watching television. Popularity and institutional branding needs seem to merge in this particular case.

In the analysis, we choose to use the labels the companies themselves have applied to their programmes in the paratexts on the VoD services, as well as in the television programme guides available to the public and in the audience ratings system Seerundersøgelsen [the viewer database] produced by Kantar Gallup.

As a consequence of this approach, this article does not present a definition of “documentary” based on the scholarly discussion of the genre and addressing the difficult distinctions between documentaries and other types of factual television, like reality television and lifestyle programming.

The sample for the analysis consists of two weeks of programming, 25–31 October 2020 (referred to as week 44) and 31 January–6 February 2021 (referred to as week 5), on all the linear channels of DR and TV 2. In the analysis, we focus on prime time programming (19:00–22:00), and the KantarGallup television viewer database is used to analyse the ratings and share of viewing for the programmes labelled as documentaries. Our inspiration for analysing the VoD services includes the contributions to this emerging kind of work in scheduling studies by Kelly (2021), Bruun (2020), and Johnson (2019). In week 44 of 2020 and week 5 of 2021, screenshots were taken once a day of the front pages of DRTV and TV 2 Play. Figure 1 shows the layout of DRTV's front page. The “prime space” (Bideau, 2020) of the VoD services’ front pages are the top rows, called decks in the professional vocabulary. The overall design logic is that the top decks are the most important, and it follows the direction of reading from left to right (in terms of centre to periphery of the front page). Furthermore, the size of the thumbnails, called tiles in the professional vocabulary, is an indicator of the editorial importance of the content presented. At the top deck – called the carousel (or the hero-board) – five to eight very large tiles are rotated. At TV 2 Play, all users are shown the first tile in the carousel when the SVoD service is started, and DRTV uses live trailers in the carousel. Both practices can be viewed as an indicator of the editorial importance ascribed to the content. We collected screenshots of all the decks on the front page of DRTV and TV 2 Play, scrolling from the top to the bottom and from left to right. Screenshots were also taken of all the content of the decks with the headline “Dokumentar” [Documentary] on both VoD services. We accessed the VoD services via Chrome and Safari browsers on our computers, and we used a subscription to the premium version of TV 2 Play that enables the subscriber to access all the linear channels and previews on the VoD service. We accessed DRTV anonymously, choosing not to use the login option. As this comparative analysis is focused on what can be regarded as the editorial prioritisation of television documentaries on linear channels and VoD services, we did not test the level of personalisation on the two services. Previous contributions to scheduling studies, however, have documented that the level is (still) quite low on both services (see Bruun, 2020; Lassen & Sørensen, 2021).

Figure 1

As a point of departure for the analysis of how television documentaries are used in the efforts to add a competitive distinctiveness to their content profiles, a brief presentation of DR and TV 2 is needed to contextualise the similarities and differences in the appropriation of the genre. The two PS companies in the small Danish market have very different funding models and organisational structures. DR is a public provider of radio and television that is 100 per cent funded by taxes. Currently, DR offers three linear television channels: DR1, DR2, and Ramasjang, which is a children's channel. DR also has the popular streaming service DRTV, which includes the online-only channels DR3, DR Ultra for older children, Minisjang for 0–3-year-olds, as well as DR2+. All of DR's activities are part of its PS obligation, and access to the content regardless of the platform is given priority because of the Danish PS regulations.

A mixture of subscriptions and advertisements funds TV 2, which only provides television. TV 2 Danmark is a limited company owned by the Danish state and has two divisions: PS and commercial. The PS division includes the main channel TV 2 and has scheduled windows for the eight regional news providers, which are supported by a tax. The large commercial division, TV 2 Networks, has no PS obligations. This division includes the website tv2.dk, six linear niche channels, and the VoD service TV 2 Play. On TV 2 Play, TV 2 offers the additional online-only sports channel TV 2 Sport+ and a portal for young children called Oiii.

In terms of viewership, TV 2 has a 48 per cent share of viewing, and the main channel has a 27 per cent share. DR's three linear channels have a combined 33 per cent share of viewing (Agency for Palaces and Culture, 2021). The VoD services provided by the two companies are popular. Among the streaming services (not including YouTube) that are important on the Danish market on a weekly basis, DRTV is number two (free VoD), just behind Netflix, and TV 2 Play (subscription VoD) is number four (DR, 2021).

In the following section, we present the findings from the comparative analysis of the editorial prioritisation of television documentaries. The findings show the promotion of two rather different content profiles by the two PS companies in which linguistic and national proximity nevertheless seem to play an important role. We begin by showing the scale, scope, and origin of the programmes labelled as documentaries by DR and TV 2 across linear channels and the VoD services. This is followed by an analysis of the kind of scheduling practices used on the linear channels and how these familiar tactics are appropriated on the front page of the VoD services.

The comparative analysis of the scheduling of television documentaries for the linear channels and VoD services at DR and TV 2 reveals both similarities and differences between the two companies’ practices. On the one hand, DR and TV 2 both seem to pursue the same goal: to secure a PS identity by editorially promoting programmes labelled as documentaries across linear channels and on the VoD services. The documentary genre is given high editorial priority on the main channels, where it is scheduled in prime time by using similar practices when it comes to Danish documentaries. The spatial and temporal promotion of these programmes on the front pages of the VoD services also shows common patterns between the two companies: Danish documentaries are used as flagship programmes, promoted in the carousel and supported by well-known scheduling tools. Furthermore, specially labelled decks and additional scheduling tools are used to promote Danish documentaries on both services. This speaks to a common publishing strategy appropriated by both companies in which the VoD services are directed at a mainstream national audience (see also Lassen & Sørensen, 2021).

On the other hand, the differences between the scheduling practices of the two PSTV companies are also obvious, and the somewhat paradoxical influence of the business models in PSTV deserves further discussion. Danish TV 2's commercial business model seems to promote a value profile in its programming that underpins the PS obligations of the main channel. This means that the kind of documentaries on offer (across the linear channels and the VoD service) is part of a proximity strategy. As shown in the analysis, TV 2 gives high priority to documentaries dominated by a national and linguistic proximity with a strong focus on human interest approaches and the everyday life of ordinary (and sometimes extraordinary) Danes. The focus on how crime is solved, criminals are captured, and normality restored in the true crime series speaks to similar egalitarian values of ordinariness, sociability, and the homogeneity of societal norms. This value profile is part of TV 2's general brand identity across its portfolio, as argued by Bruun (2020). Its emphasis on egalitarian values and cultural homogeneity is flagged online too, and it seems to be an important part of showcasing TV 2 Play as the main entry point to TV 2's content. This attempted “voice of the nation” value profile is appropriating a so-called universal-appeal model (Moe & Van den Bulck, 2018), which is associated with the PSTV monopoly era. This universal-appeal model is now applied to fight the competition from the transnational SVoD services in a kind of 2.0 version.

Based on the findings from the analysis, DR forms its PS identity by sheer weight of numbers and the variety of international and national productions offered within the documentary genre. In this way, the expanded choice provided and made possible by the VoD service seems to be an important part of DR's brand identity, and the universal-appeal model seems dominant, but with less emphasis on linguistic and national proximity than at TV 2. Instead, more weight is put on the core values of PS: universality in terms of access and diversity in terms of content. However, as documented in the analysis, the scheduling practices at the linear channels features a clear division of labour between the mainstream channel DR1 (scheduling a very small amount of Danish television documentaries in prime time) and DR2 (scheduling a huge amount of international television documentaries). In this way, DR seems to follow what Moe and Van den Bulck (2018: 877–878) have termed a “something for all tastes” model.

To sum up, even if both companies are mainstreaming the VoD services and giving high priority to a genre strongly associated with PS obligations, two different scheduling practices can be detected. Both the differences and similarities call for more research with a focus on how the different types of PSTV companies might employ traditional and new scheduling practices and professional knowledge of the different television genres alongside their national and cultural embeddedness. The differences between the scheduling practices of public service media in Norway – as described by Spilker and colleagues (2020) – and Denmark are also indicative of the need to employ a comparative approach. Although the Danish and Norwegian television markets are similar in terms of region, market size, and the position of public service television in the respective media systems, different strategies are followed by the PS companies.

This suggestion for a focus on scheduling studies within television studies is supported by the basic role of the PS VoD services that is outlined in Danish managerial strategy publications. In the TV 2 newsletter, the CEO Anne Engdal Stig Christensen described the aim as follows: “we are [trying to make] TV 2 Play the Danes’ ‘front door’ to our content” (Jöhncke, 2019). In the company strategy, Strategy 2025 – TV 2 Play for all (February 2021), the streaming service was described by the CEO as key to the PSTV identity: “TV 2 needs to maintain its position as the biggest provider of Danish content and public service. The tool is TV 2 Play” (Hansen, 2021: para. 4).

This way of promoting PS is echoed by DR. The intention to use the VoD service DRTV as the main entrance to DR runs throughout a strategic DR policy paper, and it is spelled out that “Six out of ten Danes use DRTV weekly” (DR, 2019: 13). Furthermore, in connection with a reorganisation of DR in the autumn of 2021, the CEO of DR, Maria Rørbye Røn, launched six initiatives to make DR “a beacon in the digital changeover. DRTV will be at the absolute centre and the front door to DR's TV-content” (Reseke, 2021: 3). This is part of a development that has taken place during the last five years, in which the streaming service is no longer conceived of as the online supplement – or “back door” – to the traditional “front door”, the portfolio of broadcast channels. As a trend, this is shifting the dramaturgy between the frontstage and the backstage, even though both are maintained as important platforms to secure the two modes of television viewing. According to the head of planning at TV 2, Mette Rysø Johansen, 47 per cent of the time spent by users on TV 2 Play consists of linear channel viewing (Olsen, 2021), and the decline in penetration and audience reach using traditional distribution makes VoD, as an online entry point, even more important.

As an example, TV 2's main channel has dropped to 72 per cent in household penetration, which is a problem in terms of meeting its “universality in access” obligation (TV 2, 2021: 11).

However, the strategies of both companies not only broaden the ways television documentaries can be used by the viewers, but also expands their choices of what to view. It can be argued that using genres associated with the PS identity, like television documentaries, as part of the front-door strategy might turn into a survival tool for PSTV. This perspective on the publishing strategies is a contrast to current research in PSTV in the digital era, which tends to picture PSTV as an “endangered species” or in decline (e.g., Bennet, 2018; Freedman & Gabolt, 2018; Sørensen & Hucthinson, 2017; Sørensen, 2020; Spilker et al., 2020). It is undoubtedly possible to cultivate a strategy of producing exclusive content and an editorial profile that contains linguistic and national proximity as well as being multigeneric. This might therefore be regarded as a new phase in the continued ability shown by PSTV, especially in the Nordic countries, to adapt to fundamental change in the media system, and in the television industry in particular (Syvertsen et al., 2014).