Returning to Edinburgh
Coming back to the after a few years in new/future media is a bit of an odd experience.
Having lived with the protracted gestation and birth of 91Èȱ¬ iPlayer over the last couple of years (something for which I can claim little credit), it is easy to believe the rest of the TV world sees things as we do.
A weekend here in Edinburgh reminds me that's not so. I recognise fewer faces at the festival, but the main themes are horribly familiar. The power of commissioners. Do indies get enough for their product? Is the 91Èȱ¬ too big/not big enough/too ratings driven/too commercial? (etc).
I guess I was expecting more about the new world of iPlayer and its siblings. Don't get me wrong: it was there, but not in the volume I was expecting. Choosing just the sessions that looked like discussing what's happening to the fabric of TV (as opposed to the colours and patterns programme makers paint upon it) made for a sporadic agenda.
The Festival is not generally considered to have "started" until the MacTaggart lecture has been delivered and delegates have had a chance to digest it over a beer on Friday night. (It actually started with a session on how TV execs could look good naked - a thought you might not want to dwell upon).
As you have probably read elsewhere, most people were buoyed up by , whether at the 91Èȱ¬ or Ofcom and by his call for TV simply to be entertaining.
Interestingly, when giving a couple of days later, Armando Iannucci was on the money - he emphasised the disruption that is about to happen to TV and the challenges it will present to a lot of long-held assumptions.
He highlighted what I guess we have got used to in developing iPlayer - that traditional ways of controlling what gets seen, by whom, how, where and when break down when TV content (or radio, for that matter) gets liberated from linear schedules.
Simon Nelson made a similar point in the session - the new world challenges regulators in a number of ways:
- temporal - you can't control what time the content is available to audiences (what watershed?)
- public service vs commercial - when is the same stuff one and not the other?
- territorial - control on the basis of regions is getting harder as content is either served, or simply flows, globally.
Overall, however, Iannucci was very upbeat about the prospects of these changes for programme makers - "the future is breathtaking", delivering all sorts of new forms and opportunities to produce great content. As he said, "people will watch something on their mobiles not because it has been packaged for the device, but because it's funny, engaging or clever".
He did manage to get through his whole address without saying "Content Is King", but that was at the core of it - and his "91Èȱ¬ should set up its own HBO-style subscription channel" is what .
There was a good session on short-form content, with a "Viral Grand Prix" for some clips placed on YouTube. Based on the number of views they garnered, this was depressingly won (by a mile) by Balls Of Steel - someone being kicked in the nuts over and over again. Patrick Walker from YouTube explained - there's a lot of other stuff like that on YouTube (by God, there is), so it got a lot of automated recommendations when people viewed similar clips.
So much for unleashing creativity online, then. A pity, as a number of other entries showed genuine wit. Maybe my grammar school alumnus Grayson Perry (appearing on a Question Time session) was right, and "democracy has terrible taste" (he was actually having a dig at politicians setting TV content strategies).
In the Video On Demand session, that he thought as much as 50% of all VOD will be archive material within five years, among other things.
He felt that (despite his new role) VOD will be hard to monetise as long as there are pirate alternatives available. Using the broadest interpretation of "VOD", Nigel Walley (Decipher) said that their research showed that by far the bulk of what's stored on people's Sky+ boxes "comes from the first page of the EPG" and argued that as more and more becomes available on demand direct to the TV, the business case for niche channels will get weaker and weaker. "They are only there to extend choice of what's on offer to view at a given time".
In the same session:
- Patrick Walker: "YouTube is not about revenue..." (I think he meant for users) "...people are using it for Reach and Research"
- Bebo funds a lot of its commissioned material through product placement
- A youngster called (18) was on the VOD panel and called broadcasters' programme pages "boring". He started doing vox pops about Hollyoaks and posting them on Bebo pages. They are now commissioning him to do similar stuff for them, as are Disney and Tesco(!).
was good to hear. Plenty of pithy observations about the "Gutenberg economics" of printing/publishing/TV and radio broadcasting versus the "scribal production" that is enabled by current technology. The latter allows anyone (the "scribe") to easily reach a potentially mass audience.
For him, this meant the risk had moved from the publisher, filtering the content on the basis "what sort of return will it generate on my investment?" to the consumer: "is it worth the investment of my time to consume this?". The cost of failure for the new publisher has thereby been reduced. He had a variety of examples of publishers ceding control to active consumers, notably where active communities live on beyond the media itself (Star Trek, Buffy).
He was not arguing for the amateurisation of TV production, but proposing that professionals should think more about producing for an audience of passionate consumers, then working out how to get it to them. The problem with a traditional TV broadcast mindset is that 6m passionate and active fans count less than 7m indifferent viewers. His argument was that with the scribal economics described above, there should be more trying stuff out "to see if it would work", rather than canning ideas early.
He had a great line on DRM (even if you don't agree with him): "Hey - wouldn't it be great if we could make the digital world as inconvenient as the analogue world?" He called it nostalgia - "a missed opportunity to live in the present".
Back in the world of "pure" TV, there was a masterclass by , creator of Heroes. Some stats - 400 people work on the show; it's been sold into 260 territories ("I didn't know there were that many"). They started to generate a fan base before first transmission by showing the Heroes pilot at a comics convention, where it went down a storm. They found it generated 200-odd special interest websites off the back of it. The production team also constructed , carefully separated from NBC . Responding to feedback is tricky as they are always producing several episodes ahead of what the viewers have seen and are commenting upon.
To finish, a couple of nuggets from a (slightly desperate-sounding) flyer from , the marketing body for TV advertising ("Yes, we have a bloody great axe to grind"):
- Average daily TV viewing is up (a bit) on 10 years ago
- Despite the rise of PVRs and ad-skipping, commercial "impacts" (one person viewing an ad at normal speed) are up by 5.4% on last year (homes watch about 14% more TV when they get a PVR)
- So far this year, people in the UK have watched an average 2.4bn ads a day - 42 per person.
Not me - I'm too busy trying to keep up with all the 91Èȱ¬ programmes stacked up on my Sky+.
Andy Davy is Controller, Portfolio Management, FM&T.
Comment number 1.
At 27th Aug 2008, Frankie Roberto wrote:What an entertaining summary of the festival - great post!
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Comment number 2.
At 28th Aug 2008, dougalperman wrote:I agree, an excellent appraisal.
I work in new media in both content production and marketing activities. I am often surprised and disappointed by the lack of vision and foresight shown by old media and traditional (and even some digital) marketing agencies.
The TV industry has an opportunity to embrace the inevitable change in consumption habits. The music and film industries had that opportunity, and let it slip by them for too long.
While it is true that for VOD services to be worth watching, content is king, the consumer is queen. Consumers/users/customers/viewers/listeners drive progress forward, and its inevitable. The smart production companies and agencies will embrace this progression and adapt to take full advantage of it.
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Comment number 3.
At 2nd Sep 2008, skittledog wrote:All nice points. I think that the consumer is some way ahead of the tv industry on this - or at least, the mindset is and the cash will follow suit when there are ways for it to do so. I think the success of iplayer shows that a large number of people are very willing to move away from just watching whatever's currently on telly, if there are convenient and cheap (obviously preferably free, or free enough) ways to do so.
I am personally waiting with interest to see whether Joss Whedon's little internet musical of Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog will be able to break even on its production costs. Obviously that had the advantage of a pre-built and highly internet-centric Whedon fanbase, but it was also entertaining, clever work that they all clearly thoroughly enjoyed producing. And that quite large numbers of people enjoyed watching. No word as yet on the monetary figures, but if it can make any money at all then I think its approach and implementation might be worth paying attention to. The internet lives by word of mouth and popular buzz...
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Comment number 4.
At 13th Jun 2009, U14033173 wrote:The TV industry has an opportunity to embrace the inevitable change in consumption habits. The music and film industries had that opportunity, and let it slip by them for too long. Excellent thanks..
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