informitv / news
Opinion
Elizabeth Murdoch considers television in 2015
Television executive Elizabeth Murdoch looks forward to a world of video-on-demand and downloadable programmes that will enable independent producers to compete with broadcasters by offering programmes direct to consumers.
I always find reading and indeed writing about the future a slightly soporific exercise. Mostly due to the fact that predicting our entertainment world of 2015 is an impossible task to complete with any degree of real accuracy and carries the real risk of anyone who attempts it looking ridiculous.
You only need to look back at futurologists’ predictions from five years ago to realise that no one understood the true revolution in mobile technology or the uptake of broadband.
The world we live and work in by 2015 will have been shaped by consumer behaviour and the technology that has enabled it. How, when and where people consume their media will have been enabled by technological leaps in portable, digital, and storage systems (think iPod versus PVRs – Personal Video Recorders). As the music and film industries have found, we must confront a world where consumers increasingly demand, and pay for, immediate and total access for their personal use of our product. Ubiquitous PVR usage and broadband VoD – Video on Demand – will lead to near simultaneous distribution windows for content across multiple territories and media, giving consumers flexible access to their favourite programmes.
Advertising is much maligned by reports of its untimely death which I simply don’t believe is true. It is currently still the biggest source of revenue for the broadcast TV business, although it is growing at a slower rate than subscription. What is more interesting is to forecast the form advertising may take. Future growth in advertising will come from how advertisers adapt to new opportunities and consumer behaviour.
Regardless of multi-channel penetration in 10 years’ time the way audiences will consume media content will have changed dramatically.
To take a current example, the change in viewing behaviour of a household when they do own a PVR. Whilst viewers watch 30 per cent fewer adverts, research suggests that homes with Sky Plus watch more hours of television. Surely this can only be exiting news; give people control of their viewing and reap the benefits.
But what happens when our PVRs acting as EPGs – Electronic Programme Guides – can access back catalogues of all series? I for one am looking forward to the day that I can shop on my EPG with iTunes-like customer service.
Like music, the industry is already preparing for the day when video archive is totally available to consumers for VoD to any legal device at any time. What this means is that EPGs will have to become searchable and referential. Google and Yahoo are already preparing products for searchable video archives. Not only does this reinvigorate programme libraries, but in a totally digital networked world anyone’s film is as accessible as another’s.
What does all this mean to independent producers?
We will have to have closer relationships with both broadcasters and advertisers. This is not something all three parties have been effective at doing in the past but the future funding model and media economy will not work if it doesn’t happen.
We will also be competitors to broadcasters, as the cost of entry falls even further in broadband models. Those producers that have a good enough idea to generate a business model based on earning funds direct from consumers will do so via their own virtual broadcast facility.
Obviously, none of us will be able to take advantage of consumers’ appetite for our product unless technology can provide secure encrypted delivery of our programmes to any of these new devices. And none of these new means of delivery will take hold until we (and the US studios) establish the ground rules of profit participation. Producers, broadcasters, platform operators and advertisers will need to work in close collaboration in order to enable these new business opportunities.
Ten years from now, we will have a decade of programme libraries which will never have been more valuable and we will have a much lower cost of entry to international distribution of our own product.
Will TV matter? Of course. Any access to the public consciousness, the opportunity to engage in the national psyche, is valuable and a privilege and a challenge to any one of us who finds ourselves compelled to make television. But access to the public consciousness is increasingly diverse, and we will need to work at our very highest level to earn our place at the tale. The competition will be fierce.
Elisabeth Murdoch is the chairman and chief executive of independent production company Shine. This is an abridged extract from UKTV’s new book, The Next Big Thing, a collection of essays about the future of broadcasting, published by Premium Publishing.
Copyright © 2005 Premium Publishing. All rights reserved. Reproduced with permission.
RSS