From Broadcasters to Benefactors (Part I)
23rd September 10
Posted in media
This is Part I of a two-parter. In tomorrow’s post, James takes a look at what’s already being done to address the provocation he makes here – with an interview with one of the men who’s behind the TV turnaround.
Author: James Mitchell, Planner, BBH London (@jamescmitchell)
Imagine a bath with four very discrete taps: each tap is your access to a very particular supply of water; they cannot be mixed, and you may only turn one tap at a time. This was TV in the twentieth century. In this situation, the pipe and what it carries are basically interchangeable, and your view of a TV channel could be largely made up of the programmes it transmitted. And so, people watched channels – but this idea is crumbling. The perfect storm of several forces is occurring: the multiplication of channels (and the resultant drop in general programming standards), on-demand media via the net, time-shifting and recorded viewing.. they all mean when I go home tonight I’ll be watching nothing but Channel James. If you’re interested, tonight Channel James is probably showing a marathon of streamed Peep Show, a Radio 4 documentary on Russian spying, and my housemate’s bootleg of The Human Centipede. And if any of these things bore me at any point, I can sack the station’s controller and rewrite the schedule. I’m not watching channels, I’m watching programmes.
TV, yesterday. I like to think that the slightly menacing one bottom-right is Fox News.
Now, the ideas of media fragmentation are well-documented both in a commercial sense (see Accenture’s take) and a transmedia sense (I particularly love this piece by Scolari), but the discussion’s been largely focused on the problem as it relates to lost viewing hours. You know the sort of thing: channel frets that nobody will watch their big show on TV, so they move quickly to host it on YouTube with ads, and reclaim lost revenue in some form. And that works fine for any piece of blockbuster programming that people choose to watch. But we may be letting the obvious problem obscure the more dangerous one. No channel can afford to show amazing programming one hundred percent of the time. For every X-Factor, there’s an All-Star Family Fortunes. For every Lost, there’s a Dog The Bounty Hunter. And the thing that gets precious viewership to coast from the magnificent programs to the mediocre, the thing that gets those shoestring productions to overdeliver in advertising revenue, is a channel’s identity.
This situation is a big problem for channels that try to make a profit on other peoples’ content, because the basic model of business today is to buy/create a commodity and resell for cost price + the value of your brand. This doesn’t work if your brand doesn’t get a look in. I’m not even talking about advert-dodging here: what happens when people attach no value to your channel? There’s a thousand different ways I could watch an episode of CSI right now, and there’s only one factor that matters in my decision: the cost. Which means that the answer very likely ends in Torrent and starts with Bit. Whoops, I cut out the middleman. I never even met him. I’m sure he was nice, but whatever.
A channel. Remember those?
So, the role of channel as rebroadcaster is dying, or at least about to run out of profitability. And with that, the opportunities for a channel to define itself as a source of a certain type of entertainment die too. Don’t get me wrong: TV’s primary purpose will be seen as entertainment for a long time to come, but multiplication of content and its sources mean that if we’re not careful, that’s precisely all it will stand for – vanilla ‘entertainment’, a goopy, grey mass, each provider pumping out similar treacle until CBS becomes NBC becomes Channel 5 becomes Al Jazeera becomes a DVD in a plastic bin, Seasons 1-6 for a tenner.
“Oh, I remember The Wire, it was great! What channel was it on again?”
“Hmm, I don’t remember”
Be honest now – do you?
If a universal quest for entertainment leads to homogeneity, could a modern channel adopt something else as its raison d’etre? Sure, the infrastructure of these places biases them towards entertainment distribution, but it hasn’t always been so: when Lord Reith signed the original BBC charter in 1927, he stated the broadcaster’s mission was to “inform, educate and entertain – in that order”. He might as well have added “by any means necessary,” and he’d have been straight on the cover of Ye Olde Faste Companye. Reith’s media-neutral statement was extremely forward thinking. Was it lofty to not make any reference to producing or broadcasting content back then? Perhaps, but remember this was the BBCs inception, the only time in a brand’s life cycle when someone is more likely to think “what could we do?” than just “what are we best at doing at the moment?”
Lord Reith, staring. Into the future, presumably.
There are a few routes back to relevance. There’s one particularly exciting one that I’m going to be sharing tomorrow – but it’s a big question that’s worth opening up to all: given what channels are and what they’re equipped to do, how do they rejustify a place in society?
Answers on a postcard, as they used to say.
Check out Part II tomorrow, when James interviews one of the men who’s behind the turnaround of TV, Darren Garrett, Creative head at Littleloud. Please stay tuned…
James, interesting post, look forward to reading Part II tomorrow. It reminds me of a debate I had around the time of the #save6music stuff. I listen to 6 Music quite a lot, but being in exile in India it’s often no live but on iPlayer. I pick and choose the shows I like from there and from Radio 2 and wherever. Like you say, I basically create my own channel from various sources – it’s purely content driven decisions and the channel that produced/broadcasted it originally is irrelevant. I raised the question whether, if the best of the content survived as the BBC were proposing, whether it really mattered if 6 Music died. The fact that a lot of people disagreed with me showed that it is still possible to have meaningful, differentiated channels that people are passionate about.
Hey Andrew, thanks for reading
. Funny thing is that #save6music was in my first draft. I think that it might be a generational things, but one that’s going to migrate upwards pretty soon. The question is what kind of channel conception you had when you reached the point where you made your own media decisions. So while you and I may be happy to seize our own media destinies, older people still look for an identity.
6Music is the perfect articulation. As more than one wag pointed out at the time, the chat and protests were heavily bolstered by people who thought that the station was “the [i]kind[/i] of thing we [i]ought[/i] to have (certain more machiavellian politicians, for a start), without having listened to it. How’s that for brand power? The ident influence extended way beyond the content and even the listenership.
Why could 6 music pull it off? I don’t want to go on too long, but I’ll suggest three things, I’d be interested to see what you think of them…
1) In fairness, 6 music is actually quite different, and has programming other channels don’t. The rarer this phenomenon becomes, the more valuable it is. HBO still does alright, I think…
2) The 6 music fanbase are a fairly geeky, campaigning kind. They lend themselves well to the wacky Broadcasting House demonstrations that got the campaign some more mainstream press attention. And linked to that…
3) The kinds of presenters on 6 music (you know, the ones that were fighting for their jobs) were all the kind that regularly and vehemently use twitter, which was the base of the campaign. And individually they have rabid fanbases. Campaign to save 6 music or campaign to save Adam Buxton’s job, it makes no difference… does that make sense?
Interesting that through all three, it’s the peculiarities of the channel itself that saved it…
I am always loathe to post links to my own blog in comments for fear of accusations of self-promotion, but to save me going over the same ground again, this is what I wrote at the time:
http://researchgeek.wordpress.com/2010/02/28/6music/
The discussion continued over on Curiously Persistent, and Simon’s response (and the subsequent debate in the commets) is worth a read too: http://curiouslypersistent.wordpress.com/2010/03/24/the-persistence-of-channels/
Hmm, seems that I tapping into a wider debate there! You are a ruthless man, Andrew…
I think it comes down to senses of belonging and passivity. We all need to nail our colours to some sort of mast, once in a while. And passivity – we all also need to abdicate responsibility to something else. Entertainment can’t always be work. Especially with radio, background entertainment source par excellence.
Good post James, looking forward to part two. You’re probably halfway through The Human Centipede as I write this.
Not literally, of course.
There’s two things I believe channels did (and still do, to an extent) well.
Firstly, they project a certain status onto a show… “if it’s good enough for the programmers at Channel 4, it’s good enough for me”. Does that still play a role in helping schedule what’s on Channel James? Would you have felt the same way about Peep Show if it was on Bravo or F/X? Theoretically not, maybe, the quality of the show SHOULD prevail… but I still think gems would go unnoticed.
Secondly, they performed the (increasing redundant) role of the ‘channel of last resort’… when there was nothing else on, or no DVDs you felt in the mood to watch, you default to a channel ‘just to see what’s on’…
…but of course with endless series of shows stacked in a PVR or online, that will increasingly happen less and less.
Hey John! I didn’t get to catch up with you afterwards, but I enjoyed your turn at Playful on Friday.
You’re right about what I’m going to call the Kite Mark effect. But perhaps this only works for certain types of shows? I bet you’re not so willing to apply the same logic to Cash In The Attic as Question Time, for example. But for those critical super-shows that fall between 8 and 11, where high production values about all round, that’s got to be one of the big factors.
I would never totally discount ‘last resort’. Part of the issue about being in the driving seat of your own content is that you have to bloody drive – and sometimes, nobody wants to do that! That’s when abdicating responsibility to a channel becomes quite an alluring proposition. And despite all the technical wizardry available, I remember as a student (well, 2008) still letting Dave take charge a lot of the time. Why? Well, who wouldn’t want watch The Home Of Witty Banter?
And just as it’s trendy to talk about information overload, neo-luddism etc, so I predict a shift back away from super-control, to reabdicating responsibility. That’s when the channels have got to be there, as reliable curators…
Hi James,
I enjoyed and agreed with much of your post.
One of the most standout point you made was that channels that don’t produce their own content that are most at risk. I suppose BBC will always be cocooned by the license fee and original, rights protected content. It’s the likes of Channel 4, heavily reliant on a declining linear advertising revenue that must diversify.
Broadcasters have large followings and extraordinary reach, even with, at times, such prosaic programming. Steps forward with cross platform work is encouraging such as Seven Days (online viewers deciding the fate of the characters) or Eastenders E20. What do you think of these cross platform initiatives?
I do also admire Channel 4′s foray into gaming. Shifting hundreds of hours of unwatched educational broadcasting into imaginative online games is a great move. Albeit an obvious one.
What are your thoughts on cross platform projects?
If you had the time, an investigation into ‘what’a broadcaster of the future’ would look like would be interesting, thanks.
Hey Alicia, thanks for reading!
I think the BBC has had a leg up for two reasons. First is all the tasty license money which leads to production of content – and through that, direct involvement in shaping your voice.
But there’s another one. In order to get its license money, the BBC is quite specifically asked to examine its role in public life. Every ten years, they have to do all that fun soul-searching, Mission-Statementy stuff that talks about who they are and what they have to do. Now, all companies do that – but the BBC is one of the only ones where defining their role directly leads to profit. Which means that they have always had a commerical imperative to stand for something, while other channels are only just seeing the need.
I have to say, I admire (and enjoyed E20). And the new series of Spooks had a nice transmedia element to it, where an artificial BBC news-style site updated with news pertinent to the events in the show, as they happened. Slightly less live, a plot in Eastenders about a year ago had one of the Beale kids have a foray into social networking – and via the BBC site, you could have a look at her profile, which actually hinted at forthcoming elements of the plot.
They’re great ideas, but so far they’re primarily bonuses. Fair enough, as the BBC has a commitment to accessibility, and can’t be seen to lock anyone out. But the big shift will happen when programmes come about where instead of the TV show pushing content to the online, the online segment actually starts to influence the plot of the TV. How possible that is with shooting ideas I don’t know but it has worked in primitive forms before – see factual stuff like X-change, or indeed fiction like Dubplate Drama. As more people are able to use these technologies more easily, this will only increase – and maybe there is a ‘broadcaster of the future’ idea in all this somewhere. I’ll have a chat to the expertise in-house for you ^_^
Incidentally, bonus points for guessing the content of post #2! I’d love to know what you think of Darren’s contribution.
Thanks for your thoughts James.
Following your point about online segments influencing the plot of TV, Seven Days (Nottinghill drama on channel 4) is a step in that direction. However, judging by the ratings viewers havent been enticed by the opportunity to influence the plot. I suppose it’s like many good ideas, if the excecution and timing isn’t great, it can flop. Trying this idea on a more established programme with known characters may well be a success.
Darren’s thoughts were interesting and pertinent. I agree that story telling and interaction via gaming can be more influential and certainly more engaging than one way broadcasting. Education and gaming complement each other when trying to engage a younger audience. I’m not sure the learnings will be broad enough though. By playing 2 or 3 decent educational games a year how much is really being learnt?
What are your thoughts?
Hmm… Seven Days is an interesting case, isn’t it? Despite what I’ve heard about the programme, I still don’t know exactly how the mechanics work. In this case I’d say you’re right – principle doesn’t matter a jot next to execution. People don’t really want to know what happens in Notting Hill – and if they did, it hasn’t been advertised to them that well…
The education idea is an interesting one. My thoughts on it are that its not interesting because its education, but because it touches on something relevant. Public Service can come in a lot of forms, and for C4 I think it’s been about a quest for relevance, in all its forms. I remember they also did this great Who’s Who of everyone in New Media and Politics, though I can’t find it now. About six months ago, they also developed the fantastic online safety game called Smokescreen with Six To Start – have a look at http://www.smokescreengame.com/. Maybe it’s not about the lessons learnt as such, just about the exposure to concepts…
[...] http://bbh-labs.com/from-broadcasters-to-benefactors-part-i#mce_temp_url# [...]