Russian week at Thinktank! Zombo box and the role of online shows in Russia

Earlier this month I had a chance to learn a bit about lives of digital natives in Russia. I have collected three observations about this generation, outsiders might find interesting. So it will be one observation a day for the rest of the week. Most of them are going to be about middle and upper middle class cosmopolitan youngsters and young professionals.

Russian TV is dead

With the Kremlin in control of most TV channels and broadband penetration rising, TV is a rare sight in the lives of youngsters in Russia. It is commonly known as 'zombo-box' and is considered very old school.

Instead almost all media consumption is built around the Internet - with legal and illegal downloading, advanced systems of recommendations, ratings, discussions and endless streams of suggestions from social networks, blogs and microblogs.

Youtube has its own Russian super stars, some getting over 2 million views on every video they post. More and more shows (like Minaev Live or GosDep) are now exclusively online: steaming live at certain times of the week, engaging with audience via Twitter, Skype and various polling mechanisms as they broadcast and later, obviously available online.



GosDep, political talk show for hipsters, started off on MTV (!) but despite (because of?) high viewing figures was shut down a week after to move exclusively online.