The Broadcaster Of The Future

With the entry of Netflix, Amazon and Apple into the content provision business, traditional and even satellite broadcasters can be forgiven for looking somwhat uneasily over their shoulders. These intruders are not to be ignored, they are serious players with serious infrastructure and marketing nous behind them.

The business of broadcasting, be it public service or commercial is relatively straightforward. Commission content, broadcast content, listen to audience, start again. This applies whether the broadcaster is in the business of creating original content or buying in existing content. In terms of revenue streams, advertising, syndication, format rights all follow from a successful program. Budgets we hear are shrinking, this is because advertising revenues are shrinking. Furthermore, the diversity of platforms including download and catch up TV militate against the viewer actually watching live TV. Ever wondered why there is so much sport, so many reality shows, so much fake jeopardy in modern broadcast TV? It’s to keep you watching until the next ad break – “who’s been voted off?”, “Will they bake the cake in time?”, “Who’s winning?”

So is traditional broadcasting a total anachronism? Should they just pack up their valves and transmitters and shuffle off into the distance? Well, no. Let’s examine that basic business model for a second and see if it is still relevant. Content still has to be obtained, so we can tick that box. Strike broadcast and substitute the word “Delivery” – more appropriate considering the number of channels and platforms available these days. Listen to the audience? There’s an idea. The traditional broadcaster’s method of retrieving audience feedback is via focus groups and reviews, surely an anachronism in what should now be a global industry. The focus group method takes weeks to deliver any coherent finding. Weeks in which the real audience may be rising or falling. In this day and age we can provide feedback in the form of statistical analysis to the commissioning process even to the program makers much more quickly.

The new content providers are looking at social software as a means of analysing response. Recommendation engines are key to streaming and download providers like Amazon and Netflix. Experiments have even been carried out in the UK with real time twitter feeds being made available to presenters. This I suspect will be a temporary phase – there are much more interesting uses of Twitter than amplifying sentiment into some kind of infernal feedback loop. Social software is also incredibly noisy in that it encourages people to vent. Furthermore, the more enlightened producers are beginning to realise that social software is a good means of promoting content. All of this noise needs to be filtered if meaningful data is to be extracted, but I can’t imagine a broadcaster answering the question “Would you like to know what people are saying about your show?” with a negative. Can you?

Analytics tools nowadays are more than capable of trawling social software sites and converting that unstructured data into something that can be analysed. In fact a company, Trendrr.TV has been set up in the US to provide precisely this function. This stuff is no longer being talked about behind closed doors in the industry – it’s in the public domain now. And its powerful stuff. Imagine the implications of being able to demonstrate that viewing patterns match a profile that says – “This show is going to be a slow burning hit” – and this is where I think analytics will really make a difference. Commissioners need all the help they can get in times like this – the person who is prepared to hang on in there with a series that appears to be bumping along the bottom of the audience ratings is a person with a private income or a death wish! I’d like to see more risks being taken and I think analytics have a part to play in augmenting the creative business of commissioning content. TV was once a medium that entertained, challenged and educated in more or less equal measure. Is that still the case?

The broadcaster of today could be looking at finessing that feedback mechanism between delivery and commission. Get this right, and the switched on broadcaster will be able to accurately predict audience behaviour and therefore advertising potential, will be able to assess the popularity of characters in the shows, study reaction to plotlines and subtly calibrate content accordingly. Internet time, as has been famously observed is a lot quicker than real time. Broadcast time it seems is a lot slower. There’s the gap that traditional broadcasters must fill if they are to fend off the challenge from Silicon Valley.

Celebrity Presenters (stop the world, I want to get off!)

Witless, vapid and contributing nothing save a supersized ego to the sum of human knowledge. Ok, that may be a subjective opinion, but am I the only one who has grown to detest celebrity led Television documentaries to the point where I will actually refuse to watch them?

There is a trend these days towards hiring ‘celebrities’ to front documentaries on subjects which a discerning audience may safely deduce are of,  let’s say limited interest to the vacuous twerp presenting them. The nadir of this miserable format is surely ‘Lindsay Lohan’s Indian Journey‘, a documentary with a fascinating subject; child trafficking, ruined by the most inappropriate  presenter.  The identity of the halfwit who came up with the idea that Lohan’s vast experience of scandal sheets, rehabilitation and straight-to-video films would qualify her to pontificate on this subject is unknown, but I wait in trepidation for them to commission a series featuring Amanda Holden on “Joan of Arc – the making of a martyr”.

Budgets are being cut, format television is in, the hapless viewer is in the grip of an industry that has promoted a generation of reality TV makers into editorial positions. Is it any surprise then that TV is in such a mess? Google has replaced imagination, researchers armed with Apple Macs scour the web, retrieving facts by the million …and completely miss the human stories that used to make documentary such a fascinating form. Commissioners pore over these tepid offerings, invent a suitably tabloid styled title and then, hedging their bets, invest half the budget in a celebrity presenter. Ratings are everything, quality is out, superficiality is in.

I would like, just for a change to see an old fashioned documentary that breathes life into it’s subject, one that makes me want to find out more. Genuine enthusiasts are endlessly fascinating given the chance and in some cases, possessed of a passion for their subject which is TV gold. That doesn’t mean that all celebrities are as banal and self interested as the dismal duo cited here, but please, before documentary as a medium is reduced to the depths so effortlessly plumbed by “My 100 Best Rock Songs”, can we stop patronising the viewers and return to the type of television we used to do so well?

Cutting Edge: Too Poor For Posh School

In a perfect world, I like a television documentary to offer some insight, to make me think and to show me something I don’t already know.  In real life, I’d happily take any two of those options.

The current series of Cutting Edge has been a mixed bag. Starting with the excellent ‘Eight Boys and Wanting a Girl’, a fascinating and controversial film offering genuine insight into the condition of gender disappointment it continued with ‘My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding’, a good, if one dimensional film about travellers. At this point the series seemed on course to deliver excellent viewing figures as well as interesting TV, however the plot was well and truly lost with the dreadful ‘Too Poor For Posh School’, a toadying paen to public school life that achieved nothing, other than to patronise its contributors and manipulate its audience.

The premise of the film was that we would follow the progress of a selection of students competing for entry to Harrow Public School via the ‘Peter Beckwith Scholarship’, an arrangement that has the benefit for the school of guaranteeing that at least two of the yearly intake are blessed with talent or intelligence. The assumption, accepted without question by the programme makers that the recipients would somehow be made for life, seemed questionable. No doubt there are advantages to an education in the company of the moneyed middle classes, but statistically at least there will be a proportion of these children who will turn out to be as feckless and wasted as their equivalents in state funded education.

The director was given excellent access; to the boys, to the teachers and headmaster and emerged with a film that unquestioningly accepted the view that a public school education is best and that Harrow is the best of the best – both highly controversial statements given that only 1 in 7 Harrovians graduate to Oxford or Cambridge and that the most challenging obstacle to entry is the school fee – in the region of £30,000 p.a.

Beckwith himself seemed like a decent chap, although his assertion that the beneficiaries of his generosity would sally forth to do good in the world was naive at best. Any lingering impression of humility was dispelled when we were shown an extraordinary ritual, held yearly, where the ‘Beckwith Boys’ past and present gather to tell their benefactor how their lives have been changed for the better – a ghastly event straight out of Tom Brown’s Schooldays.

The manipulation? We are told at the beginning of the programme that there are only two places on offer – we follow the efforts of four children and see two successful candidates before cutting to a scene showing the third, Tumi, receiving what we assume to be bad news…except there are really three places and Tumi is successful. Trite and manipulative. What would have been more interesting would have been to find out why one of the successful candidates chose not to accept the scholarship, in favour of a similar award from Eton.

Finally, a minor point – why does the same piece of incidental music crop up in all the programmes in the current series? Is it intended, like the dreadful mock tabloid titles, to be a signature? If so, it fails. Like this particular programme, it is an irritant.