On Wednesday I took part in a lunchtime discussion on the future of public service broadcasting hosted by the think tank Reform. In attendance were representatives of all the main UK TV channels as well as other interested parties from the advertising and newspaper industries.
It was an interesting discussion. We have plans for video but at the moment I don’t think the supporting technology is there to make it a viable business. What we need is smart STBs and high speed infrastructure capable of delivering broadcast quality video. I think the market for people watching full length TV shows and films on their computers is severely limited. These services won’t go mainstream until they are populated with good content and easy to use.
Content is king
The hard part will be getting content owners to turn the material over. I detected yesterday severe doubts from content owners about a viable business model for online video and I think their scepticism arises from the current infancy of the technology. It is not always easy to see the way things will progress but the recent Sony/Amazon deal shows the way forward.
Content owners are sitting on a gold mine in the shape of their back catalogue. What they need to do is digitise it then open it up to users. By opening content up the massive task of cataloguing the archive rendering it searchable could be shared with people who wanted to search through the archives looking for lost gems. One of my favourite films is Contact by Alan Clark. It was originally a Screen Two in the eighties and it cannot be bought anywhere. I managed to catch a screening a few years ago but apart from that it is lost unless you can find someone with a VHS tape of it. It would be fantastic if all the S2 films were digitised, searchable and easily available. That day will come and we hope to be part of it.
The future is small
The other part of the debate is creating new, innovative work. Christopher Nolan has just made Batman: The Dark Knight, he started out making a film in his spare time. He had no funding but he just got out there and did it. Since then the costs of producing a film have reduced dramatically. These days for less than £10,000 you could set up a production company capable of turning out a good quality film. At the moment the problem again is connecting these tiny companies with the people who want to see their work. Yes a lot of the stuff will be of low quality but then a lot of professionally produced stuff is equally bad in its own way. Armies of script editors and executive producers can make films look professional but theymore often make them bland.
Nolan’s first film, Following, ultimately made it to DVD but in future I see a world in which interesting new directors can connect directly to their audience’s TVs over the Internet. The technology to do this is already there and once we have a system to link producers to users there will be a revolution in what we currently call broadcasting. The future is very bright.
Read more:
On video
On Humax and STBs
On surfing
Pic: dhammza
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