This weekend I spoke on a panel at the Great Blend event,
organized by my Kiwi Foo Camp compadre Russell Brown. He’d
lined up three courses of “food for thought” for the approximately 100
people who turned up, all roughly themed around the future of media.
The soup was William
Cooper from InformITV.
He had to dash to catch a plane, but he and Russell used the
available 45 minutes for a spirited conversation. My notes
are rather shaky thanks to the excellent wine that was available, but
here are some points that I can make out:
- Interactive TV actually happened in the UK. I
only know it as the flying saucer car from late 1980s futurism books,
where you can replace “interactive TV” with “the Internet” and get an
accurate look at 2005, but apparently the Brits have a red button on
all their remotes (left over from the Teletext days) that can be used
to summon more interactive content. However, PVRs defeat
it–you don’t see the prompt to hit the red button. I found
that an interesting point: two “make TV better” technologies clashing. - He talked about “video as a social medium”, namely that
people endlessly point each other to clips on the web. I
realized “but they can’t do anything else”. All you can do
with video on the web is point people to it–it’s a very passive object
at the moment. This is still good news for movie folks, whose
only social media exposure beforehand was when people leaving theatres
called friends with mobile phones to say “don’t go to see this
movie, it sucks!”. - A friend asked a question about income from online
properties, namely how can you continue to make a $200k episode if
you’re making $60k from online distribution and the online is killing
the broadcast distribution? The question wasn’t well answered
other than a handwavy “it’ll all work out”. It’s a question I
also thought about, and I figure if TV is uneconomic then we’ll have a
new show format besides the 22m episodic TV we’re familiar with.
Serials in magazines have died out, short stories in print
are almost dead, radio plays have passed their heyday … formats
change in response to economics and technology.
The main course was Mr Brown,
a Singaporean blogger and podcaster. He’s building quite the
media empire on the net, with daily, weekly, and monthly regular shows.
A lot of his success and his subject matter is due to
Singapore’s tight media regulation.
Mr Brown had a weekly humorous newspaper column in a major
daily but the government called his editor and cancelled the column
after one particularly pointed jab at the establishment. That
was his impetus to go beyond text and produce video and audio
segments. He’s had 500k downloads of some of his pieces
(impressive–Singapore’s population is 3.5M) and was even mentioned by
the President in a talk! He, naturally, turned the shoutout
into a humorous jab.
It was an entertaining presentation, and a look at how blogs
are actually changing political institutions in a part of the world
that doesn’t have free media or particularly representative democracy.
Finally came a rather-too-meaty dessert, the panel that I was on: “the future of media”
with Clare O’Leary of New Zealand On Air (the government body that
contributes towards local program development), Mr Brown, and Eric
Kearley from Television New Zealand (the state-run broadcaster).
Eric started with a quick plug for his work within TVNZ,
launching the new digital free-to-air channels. His message
was that people panic about the Internet only until they have
experience with it, then they stop holding conferences about the effect
of the Internet on Media and instead just get on with putting their
media on the Internet.
In particular, he advocated “brands not shows”. That
is, you create a brand (like “Big Brother”) that exists in multiple
media (TV, online, print, figurines, interpretive dance), attempting to
reuse your work as much as possible between media. During
Q&A I tried to probe how this model handles the declining
revenues from TV, but he was handwavey.
I was asked what we at O’Reilly think about the future of
media, and I replied it was personalization and social experience.
We love the web because my web experience can be different
from yours, yet I can still influence and change your experience by
simply sending you a link. There are no real social TV
experiences (the social stuff happens around the watercooler, rarely
around the TV). Schulze
and Webb are working on a social
radio prototype for the BBC, and I hope boffins are working
on similarly connecting viewers around TVs.
I didn’t mention it, but something else I’ve been pondering is
the way that PVRs separate broadcast time from viewing time.
Here’s a crazy idea: a web site lets people select what shows
or movies they want to watch, those shows are scheduled over the
satellite, and subscribers’ PVRs pick them out and saves them for later
viewing. PVRs could be networked and automatically record the
stuff your friends recorded so it’s right there when they later say
“wow, you have to see the latest Big Survivor House Race”.
Think NetFlix for over-the-air TV.
One interesting point that Mr TVNZ had to make was that the
traditional perception of ad revenue decreasing as the Internet steals
viewers isn’t necessarily true. The true events that unite
people around their TV in real time (in the US it’s SuperBowl, in NZ
it’s rugby, in the UK it’s probably the Queen’s Christmas Message) will
be all the more valuable for their rarity, the argument goes.
I’m not sure I buy it–it’s an argument that total value will
drop to zero, but unquantified it fails as an argument that ad revenue
will persist at current levels.
Anyway, a fun evening was had by all (not least because the L.E.D.s
played afterwards). If you have any thoughts on the future of
TV, please let me know what they are. It all appears up for
grabs at the moment.
(Update: Fake Steve Jobs has a great rant on why the Internet (and the Real Steve Jobs in particular) are the flaming comet to the TV networks’ dinosaurs)