gizblog

Big day, big news

Today marks the end of a hectic couple of months. Lots of announcements and briefings about our ambitions and plans at Channel 4.  The details, documents and videos are all here.

My video contribution isn't on the site (for rights reasons) although given I look a bit like John Terry remonstrating with an off-screen ref that's no bad thing.

Initial reaction seems good, and the next few months will be relentless, fun and a fight worth fighting.

Episode 15,000

Lame.

After all the build up, the 15,000th episode of The Archers was just lame. I've been a listener for a decade or two, off and on, and this was one of the least convincing, and worst resolved, cliff hangers for a long time.

Tim Bentinck, who plays David Archer, once said he'd like his character to be a bit less boring, and maybe have an affair. I suppose it was always unlikely that this would happen, or that Ruth would actually sleep with Sam the herdsman. But surely there could have been a bit more of a twist in the story, even in the week in which Ambridge learned of its first gay wedding.

Media brands and dangerous lunatics

A great piece by David Hepworth in Media Guardian on the challenges faced by offline media brands who want to engage with their readers online. It's a succinct and enjoyable read.

Here's the creative dilemma for magazine publishers on the web. They know how to fashion a product. A community site isn't really any such thing. A magazine is a compromise between the range of content that can realistically be offered, the people who can be persuaded to go into a shop to buy it and the advertisers who can be lured into supporting it. However, a website is an arena where things take place. The relationship between editor and reader is altered from priest-acolyte to host-guest. The magazine is no longer the gatekeeper guarding the door to the cupboard marked "content". They provide the name above the door of the club and what goes on inside will be dictated by the people who visit.

Editors are always ambivalent about the actual members of the public who pay their salaries. When readers are writing in to tell them how good their magazine is, they're people of rare taste and discrimination. When they're complaining about something, they're dangerous lunatics with too much time on their hands. With a community site you're inviting those self-same lunatics in and asking them to help hand round the peanuts.

Neatly put: this is a real dilemma which we struggled with in setting up icircle way back when. Enabling users to participate, while not wanting them to take over, is really hard. Particularly if you've spent your career building and protecting your brand offline. Perhaps the biggest leap of faith is to admit that your customers never realised that you owned the brand in the first place.

The End of Network Television?

I was recently on a panel at an RTS event on the challenges facing network television. The day focused on sessions with the heads of various broadcasters (BBC, Channel Four, CBS, Sky and ITV) describing their digital strategies and to build confidence in the future of the networks. Given the audience mostly consisted of television folk, they didn't face a particularly rough ride.

A few things struck, and concerned, me.

The first was the contrast between Les Moonves (head of CBS) and everyone else. His speech focused on the enormous opportunities he saw for his network and content, both at home and abroad, and the new distribution partnerships he was exploring. The UK sessions quickly became insularly focused on how to sustain the unique (and don't get me wrong, wonderful) ecology of public service broadcasting.

The second was that broadcasters are a long way from understanding user generated content. There was an implication floating around that there is user generated content, and there is 'real' content: high production values, commissioned and created by professionals. This is a risky, and frankly patronising, attitude. Decent stuff will be produced and distributed to huge audiences by 'non-professionals'. And for most people the content they produce is the most valuable stuff of all: people rescue their photo albums and home movies before their DVD collections if their house is on fire.

And finally, I'm still amazed that the scale of the challenges facing tv channels can be so under rated. True, they still dominate people's leisure time, and aggregate mass audiences, and remain enormously powerful in distributing and marketing content. But large chunks of time, particularly in key demographics, is migrating to other activities (particularly online). And their relationship with consumers is, I think, very shallow. Kate's been living in the UK for ten years now, and has consumed her fair share of television. But she can't really articulate the strategies and positioning of the main channels, and her consumption consists of flicking through the first few channels, or rummaging on Sky+, to find something she's interested in. My eldest son, meanwhile, likes Match of the Day and Dr Who, but if you ask him which channel they're on he's unsure and will guess "101?".

See if you think this works. Linear broadcasting is a dumb way to distribute visual content: the equivalent of telling people the order in which they should read books, or listen to their CD collection. Television channels only exist because we couldn't work out the physics of on-demand distribution earlier, so we had to invent them. Consumers have real relationships with TV content / brands, but not with their channels of distribution, anymore than they care about Madonna's record label or Harry Potter's publisher. Because television channels have been able to 'hijack' our attention, our relationship with them is more based on the Stockholm syndrome than it is with real consumer loyalty.

I'm certain that TV channels will remain powerful, and be around, for a very long time. But give consumers a choice, and they'll exercise it, and there are only 24 hours in the day. The Long Tail should be compulsory reading for anyone who cares about the future of their channel, and even more so for those who have content which they want to distribute.