Final answer:
The efficiency of unicast streaming degrades as more viewers are added, due to its one-to-one nature. Narrowcasting offers a specialized approach by targeting specific content to distinct audience segments, allowing networks to provide a variety of channels for interactive selection by viewers.
Step-by-step explanation:
Unicast streaming's efficiency decreases with the more people who need to view the stream. In contrast to broadcasting and narrowcasting, unicast sends data to a single recipient, which can cause bandwidth use to scale linearly with each additional viewer. However, the method of narrowcasting represents a shift from traditional broadcasting. It involves targeting media content to smaller, specific audiences according to their interests, such as genres including reality TV, sports, drama, comedy, and news/weather.
When it comes to narrowcasting, major networks provide a variety of channel choices and programming. This allows viewers to select content interactively, catering to their preferences. As the media landscape diversifies and segmentation increases, mass-media strategies seeking the 'lowest-common-denominator' for content may no longer be necessary or financially viable, since specialized content tends to engage more discrete, economically, socially, and politically distinct audiences.