Listen up y’all

June 6, 2008 at 11:47 pm · Filed under broadcasting, media, social media, tv

Summing up keepfakingit’s previous post: Broadcasters have for years in the UK shown nothing but contempt for their audience. Despite their audience paying their wages, the corporations have insisted that the AUDIENCE PAYS (through SMS, premium rate calls etc.) every time they communicate with the broadcaster. This is ridiculous.

Let’s examine a few facts here. I recently wrote about Clay Shirky’s assertion that people are clawing back some of the time they spend with their TVs and putting that into more creative endevours. Shirky calls this Social Surplus. As someone who works for a broadcaster and sees far too much TV, keepfakingit calls this common sense.

Now let’s look at a trend that’s on a huge upward curve in the US and is following suit in Europe, the simultaneous usage of PC and television. TV ownership per household is somewhere north of 3 right now (can’t find a reference so you’ll just have to trust me on this one) PC ownership is over two and rising fast. Something’s got to give right? According to Shirky there are only so many hours in the day we can consume (or create) media. Well not really. In ever increasing numbers people are watching TV whilst warming their knees with their 15″ Latitudes. IMing and Facebooking whilst contemplating which buffoon to vote out of Big Brother, by text of course.

Right now I don’t see any major broadcasters attempting to tap this in a meaningful way. Yes the news channels ask and use UGC in ever increasing amounts, but live TV has not yet embraced IM, Twitter or even simple commenting and ratings systems.

Dual users are still in the minority but there’s one breakthrough coming that’s about to push dual usage into the ascendancy. Usable, affordable mobile internet. When everyone’s got virtually free bandwidth in their pocket thanks to wi-fi devices, all of a sudden everyone has a conduit to shout abuse at Davina McCall.

And they won’t have to pay for doing it.
All of a sudden Soccer AM’s MySpace profile or Facebook group can have a meaningful roll before, during, and after each show.

It’s time for the producers and creatives involved in mainstream television to start listening at their viewers level, and maybe even start listening where their viewers are talking. With SMS and premium line voting now almost untouchable in the UK, what have broadcasters got to lose?

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Micro broadcasting for dollars and millicents

January 21, 2008 at 11:24 pm · Filed under media, technology, tv

Millicent, the super lo-fi, low-cost, use-it-with-web2.0-things is profiled in today’s MediaGuardian. This is great. I think. Particularly the distributed collaboration aspect.

Let’s see if we can get a demo of this for a team that is split in three locations around the British Isles and is producing non-live content for web and broadcast. We’ll post some results here maybe.

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BBC, ITV and Channel 4 partner on dl service

November 28, 2007 at 4:09 pm · Filed under content, media, ondemand, tv

The big three in the world of UK terrestrial have put aside their great big old media egos as well as their commercial rivalries to partner on a shared download service.
As the Guardian describe it, the partnership seems to make a lot of sense. And they’ve left the door open for other broadcasters and content owners to jump into the new service. Here’s some stats from the Guardian piece on the independent services already running from BBC, ITV and C4.

• Channel 4 was the first broadcaster to launch a comprehensive on-demand
  service a year ago and a spokesman said 60m programmes had been viewed
  to date, just under 10m of those online.
• ITV said almost six million unique users had visited ITV.com in October, viewing 2m programmes.

BBC Worldwide’s’ CEO, John Smith,  pointed at the failure of the music industry to adapt  quickly enough  to a distributed online audience as a key driver to this initiative.

[He] said it
was a “historic moment” and that a key aim was to avoid the fate of the
music industry in losing control of its assets. “In the UK we felt
worried about what happened to the music industry,” he said. “[Apple's]
iTunes is a disaster for rights holders.”

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