Maximising public value in the "now" media world

Andy Duncan CEO of Channel 4 has given a lecture sponsored by the new stateman entitled Maximising public value in the "now" media world.

Its quite lengthy, but worthy of 15 minutes of your time. I have picked out a few of the key highlights as they struck me.

I think it is a powerful, and well consructed presentation, however, I do disagree that mass media TV still occupys the centre ground as it once did. Viewing figures of the Christmas Special for British comedy duo Morcambe and Wise in the 70's was some 26 million people. Now only blockbuster events for example, if England make it to the World Cup semi's may even get close. That is the significance of the change.

Duncan also recognises that C4 is no longer a broadcster in the traditional sense, with the creation of multiple-platforms including radio.

He argues the revolution has had a slow fuse, I would agree or as Ed Richards of OfCom described our recent past as an historic, evolving act of liberation.

Duncan worries that we will edit our lives to suit us, which we will, and in doing so we expose ourselves less and less to outside forces, that might help us redefine or alter our world view, and that there is still a vital role for terrestrial broadcasters like C4 to play in this new world order. again I think he is right.

But this comes down to the quality of the programming and content, which he also refers to.

Today however, as we have suggested the world is no longer a world of mass markets, but a world of niche mass audiences. iPTV is a threat and it will develop rapidly over the next few years. As broadband penetration increases it will be interesting to see how people will use that capability to view content that attracts them.

Duncan also refers to myspace.com with conversations going on between 70 million people, and I would also like to mentioin youtube, which gets 40 million unique visitors a day. There is some discrepancy between those numbers and the mass media blockbuster figures of 8 to 5 million for Big Brother.

Markets are no longer toed to geographic borders, and I wonder if this is a challenge that C4 are addressing as the BBC have so successfully done.

Jamie Oliver is also mentioned, as a project that they enabled, School Dinners was a defining moment in TV and beyond and I suggest there are real lessons to be learn't from this particular initiative where a cold media broadcast migrated to a hot media event, engaging audiences, to interact and to take specific action enbaled by a cross media approach to communications.

Five years further into the digital revolution, I want to put to you a rather different proposition. Far from being on its last legs, public service television is the sturdiest bridge we have from the old analogue world of the mass viewing experience to the rapidly emerging future of consumer-led, made-to-measure media and the opportunities of a digitally-connected society. Public broadcasters will help us get there. By then, though, they'll be in much more than the business of broadcasting.

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The transitional period we're in now, between the comfortable certainties of the analogue era and the apparently limitless possibilities of a digital future, can look chaotic, anarchic, even frightening. However, we're not facing a technological fait accompli over which we have absolutely no control. As broadcasters and policy-makers, we don't surrender our ability or abandon our duty to make choices about the post-digital media environment we want, just because it's now possible to search the internet for clips from four million videos or blog the intimacies of our daily lives to a fascinated world.

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So I'd like to use this lecture to explore the role and potential of a public corporation like Channel 4 in a world where broadcasting is just one means of content distribution among many; where those quaint old things we call "programmes" occupy just one shelf in a massive cash-and-carry content warehouse. How will our traditional brief of serving up education and information alongside entertainment fit into a market where power lies with the consumer and the content creator, not the packager? Can public broadcasters be as influential and productive for wider society after digital switchover as they have been until now?

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Finding truth in a confused and rapidly changing market populated by powerful vested interests is a tricky business. While new phenomena such as the "social networking interface" MySpace have impressive hit rates, it's worth remembering the continuing power of traditional TV to deliver big audiences.

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Eight million people tuned in for the opening night of the latest series of Big Brother and nightly audiences are regularly peaking at over five million.

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So everything is shifting all the time. But the main trends are clear enough. Broadcast television is no longer the funnel through which entertainment and information are channelled to millions of waiting consumers in a one-way flow. The ever-expanding choice of reception platform - TV, mobile, internet, MP3 player - and the potential for everyone to create and distribute their own content, however humble, are ineluctably eating away at the broadcaster's traditional role as overseer in the great treasure house of content.

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Already, users of "now" media have a collective experience of a different kind. Television wraps millions of individuals, thousands of disparate groups, together in a cover-all common experience. Mobile and online technologies connect people within those disparate groups, uniting them by common interest or specific purpose - to buy a handbag on eBay, recruit a flashmob, or pick out their favourite bit from Desperate Housewives. You choose who you connect with, search for exactly what you want, see pretty much what you want to see. You're in control. You don't have to accept an experience someone else has made, when and how they decide to give it to you.

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Where once only the rich and the worthy were granted access to the means of creating and distributing content, now virtually anyone can do it. This opens up not just a thousand potential new business models, but millions of ways for people to communicate and share material with each other, many of them delivering their own small packets of social and public value. Bloggers in Iraq, students in Syracuse, voluntary, political and community groups, and yes, the New Statesman (hello, by the way, to those of you listening to this as a podcast); all these people now have a platform from which they can address a global broadband audience and hear back from them.

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Perhaps the most exciting area, with huge potential for making a difference in the "now" media world, is in the heartland of the old public service brief: education.

This is where the explosion of interactivity, the convergence of platforms, the merging of the internet's resources with television's power, has perhaps the greatest potential of all.

Comments

[discount Just Cavalli jewellery]

I am apreciating it very much.I have never read such a lovely article and I am coming back tomorrow to continue reading.

[ノースフェイス]

グランビルアイランドのゴールドフロアに韓国の民主主義人民共和国に北朝鮮最高人民会議の常任委員会はさらに、伝統的な朝鮮·中国友好と友好関係を強化し、さらなる対外経済関係の発展を拡大するために経済特区 "判決"を指定するグランビルアイランド（Granville Island）経済特区開発計画の承認、金床の決断を下した "と経済を開発するために外国投資を誘致するため、他のポートや産業分野で積極的になるようにこの機会を利用。

[グッチ]

もともと店舗前の道路は数十年前に決まった都市計画に基づく拡幅計画の対象。同商店街では約１０メートルの道路幅を１６～１７メートルに広げるが、震災前に着工の見通しは立っていなかった。しかし市は昨年１２月になって「道路拡幅は災害に強いまちづくりに必要」と計画を進める意向を示し、住民説明会を始めた。