Speech given at Media Guardian's Changing Broadcast Summit 2007, London
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Wednesday 31 October 2007
Printable version
From volume to value: The new direction for ´óÏó´«Ã½ Vision
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Check against delivery
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I'm delighted to be here this morning – even though anyone drawing the straw that means they have to follow Michael ... well, I guess there are easier rows to hoe ... like Malcolm at the end of Spooks last night.
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This is an important time in the development of British television. Every now and then television reaches a crossroads, and the choices made at that point set the direction for the years ahead.
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The birth of ITV, the advent of colour, the arrival of multi-channel – these were big crossroads in the history of our industry when we took fundamental decisions on behalf of our audiences - and those decisions defined the direction of travel for the industry as a whole.
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We've reached another of those big crossroads.
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Convergence, which we've all been talking about for years, has finally arrived as broadband has become pretty much ubiquitous; and the plummeting cost of (hard-disc) video-storage means that on-demand has suddenly become a real factor affecting audience choice.
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There are other things as well – like the licence fee settlement - but in the grand scheme of things, they are actually pretty minor factors compared to the big drivers of convergence and on-demand.
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The new landscape into which we've moved means that, once again, we have to take some fundamental decisions on behalf of our audiences – make choices that will define the direction of travel for the next few years.
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The ´óÏó´«Ã½ has now taken those decisions and made those choices, and what I'd like to do this morning is to explore the implications of those decisions for ´óÏó´«Ã½ Vision, and explain the reasoning behind the choices we've made.
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There are always two competing narratives about British television. One narrative tells the story through the interests of programme-makers; the other through the interests of audiences. These two narratives can sometimes get quite far apart, and I think we're at one of those moments now.
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Take, for example, the decision we've made to commission 10% less content. For the production staff affected, this is a time of pain and understandable anger. I don't for a moment want to diminish the disruption this is causing the programme-making community and for some, of course, it's hard right now to get past the personal impact of that 10% decision. Inevitably it's being presented as a diminution, a reversal, a retreat.
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But this isn't how it looks from the audience's point of view. From their perspective, the narrative is very different.
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What audiences are seeing right now is not a diminution of choice, but an explosion of choice.
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They'd got used to multi-channel, but now they're discovering that broadband is turning the internet into a television channel offering a range of choice that makes multi-channel look simple.
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At the same time they're aware that a very familiar consumer-technology story is unfolding where the technology of on-demand is concerned: it's getting cheaper and it's getting better.
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One reliable industry estimate puts the current fall in the cost of hard-disc video storage at 80% a year. That means that in five years' time, £200 will buy you a device capable of storing a quarter of a million hours of content. What audiences are waking up to is that they are entering a world of near infinite choice.
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The ´óÏó´«Ã½ iPlayer is a good example of what's happening. Even though the iPlayer currently only gives audiences access to one week of ´óÏó´«Ã½ schedules, it transforms the choice available to them.
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Without iPlayer the ´óÏó´«Ã½ can, broadly speaking, offer adults four non-news peaktime TV choices at any one time: ´óÏó´«Ã½ One, Two, Three and Four. But with the iPlayer, the ´óÏó´«Ã½ can offer those same audiences hundreds of hours - the sum of virtually all the peaktime ´óÏó´«Ã½ choices available in any seven-day period. And, if you include the full range of programmes available, then by Christmas the iPlayer will offer you 400 hours of choice at any one time.
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From four choices to 400 choices – it's a transformative change.
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In the world our industry has known since its birth, tight restrictions on choice have always been a given.
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Not any more.
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In the new world we've now entered, range of choice is no longer the question.
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For audiences, the question is time – time to watch the vast choice of programmes available on demand.
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And for programme-makers, the question is not volume but value. The question is not how many programmes can you make, but how do you get your programmes noticed, how do you get them to cut through, how do you get their value recognised.
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In this new world value is no longer a function of volume but of impact. It makes sense to lower the volume of output and put more investment into increasing its impact. And, in essence, that's what the ´óÏó´«Ã½ has decided to do.
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Reprioritisation has been reported as though the main driver is the licence fee settlement. But it isn't. The main driver is that we've entered a new landscape, a landscape where time is the question for audiences, and impact is the question for programme-makers.
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So, if audience impact is the issue for the industry, how do you create that other than by continuously ratcheting up your marketing spend?
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As far as ´óÏó´«Ã½ Vision is concerned, we've come up with a range of solutions to this problem and these are now beginning to define our commissioning strategies.
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The first thing we're going to do is concentrate our investment in the areas where we know it will pay the biggest dividend for our audiences – ambitious peak-time projects.
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The rule with ambition is: if it feels easy, it's probably not worth doing. If you look at that 10% of content that we're no longer going to commission, the things to fall by the wayside will be proposals that feel like something we've already done, that don't have a quality of stretch about them, a quality of reaching for something quite hard to attain. The kind of content, in other words, that audiences won't miss as much. And which have tended to find a home in off-peak and late-night slots.
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And let me just spell out some other priorities:
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There will be a closer relationship between ´óÏó´«Ã½ Two and ´óÏó´«Ã½ Four, sharing content and closer coordination of commissioning and planning.
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We will be offering more complementary programming – squeezing more value out of our content - and better use of material across the portfolio with an increase in narrative repeats offering the audience a chance to catch up or to have a second showings.
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In factual, for example, we'll consolidate our spend more in the heart of the schedule and particularly in the specialist factual subjects at the heart of our knowledge strategy – history, science, arts, religion, natural history, current affairs, and so on. We are looking for big, ambitious series that deliver real, lasting impact, and we are prepared to fund them well. For instance we'll be doing: Frozen Planet – a portrait of the Earth's polar regions, the last great wilderness on the planet; and a new series, Between The Wars from Andrew Marr.
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In music and arts, we're hitting culture head on; there will be more landmarks like the Genius Of Photography on at the moment. We'll continue to show strands like Imagine, Arena, with The Culture Show and Later With Jools moving to more prominent slots on ´óÏó´«Ã½ Two. We'll be offering
range, vitality and topicality. So in 2008 we are celebrating Liverpool's year as Capital of Culture with extensive multimedia coverage including a Christmas Nativity and a special Electric Prom.
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Another way of increasing impact is to exploit the potential of broadband to deepen the experience and to create a living archive.
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´óÏó´«Ã½ Vision was created to put the ´óÏó´«Ã½ at the heart of the emerging multi-platform landscape. This means that our definition of ambition will increasingly be bound up with TV and broadband and other media. In the new world we're entering, audiences won't recognise much difference between online and offline.
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Encouraging more creative risk-taking is another way in which we can hope to increase impact.
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Encouraging creative risk-taking isn't the same as not thinking. It doesn't mean taking stupid risks. But, honestly, there's only one way to abolish risk completely, and that's to go on repeating past successes over and over again. At a time when our audiences keep telling us they want something new and fresh, not taking creative risks is an invitation to the off button. And, by the way, creative risk-taking doesn't always have to imply edgy and discomfiting. There were proposals for a musical-theatre-based talent show circulating in the industry for years, but everyone thought musical theatre was too much a niche interest to win big audiences – until ´óÏó´«Ã½ One took the risk and delivered a giant mainstream hit with How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria.
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There's a flip-side to encouraging risk-taking. It's embracing failure. As someone once said: you can't have the C word – Creativity – without also sometimes hearing the F word – Failure. Not all the risks your risk-takers take are going to deliver the goods. My line on failure is this: when your risk-takers fail, bind up their wounds, learn the lessons - and be prepared to give them another chance.
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One more way of delivering impact: concentrating on distinctiveness.
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Distinctiveness is one of those words that's been floating about the ´óÏó´«Ã½ lexicon for as long as I can remember - often without a very clear definition.
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Well, my definition is simple: it's about surprise and delight. Surprise implies innovation – offer me ideas I haven't already heard a million times; and delight implies – it is good, and it is different.
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Our audiences want to be surprised and they want to be delighted. They want the ´óÏó´«Ã½ to add to their experience of the world, of entertainment, of culture, of the creative act. I am not talking about running down a narrow cul-de-sac of market failure genres – that argument, made usually in self-serving ways (either serving an elite, or commercial interests, usually), doesn't hold up if the licence fee is universal. Aiming for quality and difference does, across all audiences and all genres.
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So these are some of the choices we've made in reshaping ´óÏó´«Ã½ Vision, choices informed by what audiences are telling us they want in this new world: emphasising quality over quantity, weeding out the also-rans, encouraging creative risk-taking, rewarding ambition, putting multi-platform at the centre of what we do, prioritising distinctiveness.
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The essence of this new direction is an emphasis on value not volume. And our definition of value will be led by the way audiences themselves allot value to programmes over time.
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That means you'll be seeing new metrics emerging which place more importance on AIs than on ratings, and that attempt to weigh long-term impact and not just the overnights.
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The other big strategic choice we've made is to deliver more value for audiences through all our channels.
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Channels are still an effective – and relatively cheap – way of delivering programmes to different audiences. People forget that the ´óÏó´«Ã½ can't pick and choose its audience demographics as some broadcasters can – who can say "we'll concentrate on this audience and forget about that one".
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The licence fee that everyone has to pay lays on the ´óÏó´«Ã½ the duty to deliver something of real value back to everyone – not everyone all the time, but everyone should find things in the ´óÏó´«Ã½ that they really value and that justifies the licence fee to them. Our channels help us do that.
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The recent arguments about closing down this channel or that have been driven by a peculiarly narrow vision of the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s mission.
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It's as though open season had been declared, legitimising every critic in the land to take down their 12-bore and go hunting the bits of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ that don't serve them personally.
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But all that's accomplished is the realisation that those taking the pot shots are usually much more interested in protecting their own territory than in embracing the larger mission of the ´óÏó´«Ã½.
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When middle-aged commentators get snooty about ´óÏó´«Ã½ Three, for example, you know what? It actually reassures me. If people over 50 were turning on to ´óÏó´«Ã½ Three in enormous numbers the channel would be failing to fulfil its remit, which is to bring younger audiences a high quality mixed-genre schedule of innovative UK content featuring new UK talent. Which is exactly what ´óÏó´«Ã½ Three is doing.
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It has the highest reach to 16-34s of any digital channel and its audience appreciation is consistently high and young audiences feel a strong allegiance to ´óÏó´«Ã½ Three.
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So the channels stay with distinctive purposes.
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CBeebies and C´óÏó´«Ã½, maintaining their strong commitment to high levels of original British content that reflect the lives and experiences of their audiences.
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´óÏó´«Ã½ Three – cutting through with high-impact factual like The Baby Borrowers or Kill It Cook It Eat It; impressive new British comedy like Gavin And Stacey and great home grown new drama like Drop Dead Gorgeous. ´óÏó´«Ã½ Three is living up to its reputation of growing talent for the wider ´óÏó´«Ã½ portfolio.
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There's relevant and eye-opening current affairs such as last week's striking investigation into honour killings – the result of three years' work. And in December, a season of hard-hitting stories told through the voices of young people.
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And next year ´óÏó´«Ã½ Three launches a new sitcom currently being written by Tim Dawson, aged 19. Let me say that again: a new sitcom, written by Tim Dawson, aged 19. Remember what I said about encouraging creative risk-taking?
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It's a similar story for ´óÏó´«Ã½ Four.
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´óÏó´«Ã½ Four reaches six million people each week. Where other factual digital channels have lost audience, viewing to ´óÏó´«Ã½ Four has grown each year since launch. This summer it was 20% up on the equivalent weeks last year. The first instalment of Andrew Davies' wonderful adaptation of Fanny Hill drew the channel's biggest audience ever as part of the thought-provoking season on a period in the 18th century when it felt as if Britain had gone too far and which helped trigger the puritanism of the Victorian age which followed.
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And there are great things ahead. Robert Bartlett taking us inside the mediaeval mind. Simon Russell Beale and Harry Christopher's The Sixteen exploring sacred music. Michio Kaku examining artificial intelligence, quantum physics and biotechnology. Not to mention the scathingly sublime Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe, the best contribution to building media literacy anywhere in UK broadcasting. As with ´óÏó´«Ã½ Three and comedy, ´óÏó´«Ã½ Four is turning into a forcing ground for new presenting talent.
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´óÏó´«Ã½ Three and ´óÏó´«Ã½ Four are an integral part of the vision for Vision. They allow us to focus on developing new talent, on pushing out the boundaries of what it's possible to do with television and the web, and on working out new ways to deliver expensive genres like drama at lower cost (which was one of the less celebrated of many good things about The Thick Of It).
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And they also allow us to focus on the needs of important audiences who haven't always felt they got enough they really valued from their licence fees.
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´óÏó´«Ã½ Two, now as always, the very centre of the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s knowledge mission. It offers a unique service in mainstream broadcasting with serious factual programming at its heart. ´óÏó´«Ã½ Two is reaching more people year on year, and you can get a good idea of the direction the channel is travelling from some of the big knowledge content planned or in development.
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Horizon will remain at the heart of the channel's science output, committed to serious documentary coverage of the latest research in all fields of science. There will be an expansion of landmark science series including a major History Of Science to coincide with the anniversary of the founding of the Royal Society in 2009, and significant programming to mark the anniversary of Darwin's Origin Of The Species on both ´óÏó´«Ã½ Two and ´óÏó´«Ã½ One.
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In history, Timewatch will continue, alongside big history series including Laurence Rees's forthcoming World War II Behind Closed Doors.
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In natural history, Natural World will continue as the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s core natural history documentary strand, alongside major series such as Wild China and Yellowstone. Autumnwatch and Springwatch, both hugely popular, will continue.
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In current affairs, This World continues at peaktime. The Money Programme will continue. Peter Taylor has a new series - Age Of Terror, Jonathan Dimbleby will be dissecting contemporary Russia, and Norma Percy examining events in Iran.
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I could go on. I haven't even mentioned coverage of religion, or music, which will continue as mainstays of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Two schedule.
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And finally ´óÏó´«Ã½ One.
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It's becoming a commonplace of the industry to say that channels, especially mixed genre channels, are dead or dying. Well, they're not – not yet and not for a long long time. And ´óÏó´«Ã½ One is the living proof of that.
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Seventy-eight per cent of the population still tune into ´óÏó´«Ã½ One every week, more than any other channel, and more than all the UK digital channels put together.
´óÏó´«Ã½ One is still considered the best channel for Comedy and Drama overall, and despite the growth in digital competition for younger viewers even 16-34s still think ´óÏó´«Ã½ One is best for Drama.
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´óÏó´«Ã½ One is on a roll and if you want to sum up its achievement in two words, they are Saturday, and night.
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Did you know that only 13% of the UK population go out on a Saturday night? A figure that drops to 8% in Wales and 4% in Northern Ireland? It's a huge opportunity for the ´óÏó´«Ã½ to reach its heartland audience with shows that unite.
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Family viewing doesn't mean shows have to be tailored just for children. On Saturday night, all ages come together. Adults watching with adults tend to like the same shows as parents watching with children. What we're all looking for is that unifying Saturday-night-shouting-on-the-sofa moment that appeals across ages and genders: Strictly Come Dancing, Any Dream Will Do.
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Here, I'd like to pay tribute to Peter Fincham, whose great talents were recognised when ´óÏó´«Ã½ One was voted Channel Of The Year at Edinburgh. Peter has left a brilliant line-up for this and next year and, apart from being a wonderful colleague, he relentlessly focused on the great artists, performers and sheer talent on the channel. He has left a big gap to fill and he's left a great legacy in an outstanding slate of upcoming treats on ´óÏó´«Ã½ One. Classic dramas – Lark Rise To Candelford with Dawn French, and contemporary drama and serials such as the Last Enemy, a major thriller on air next year, and Bonekickers, an investigative adventure series from the creators of Life On Mars. More peak-time comedy than we've ever had in recent years, great factual, including Life In Cold Blood, the latest offering from David Attenborough, and a striking drama presentation of the Easter Passion, stripped across the week, with a wealth of multi-platform and complementary support on other channels.
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So, to sum all this up.
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We'll have, regrettably, both turbulence and pain ahead, especially as the ´óÏó´«Ã½ gets smaller – but at the same time the ´óÏó´«Ã½ will concentrate on the long-term opportunities for audiences in this new world of value not volume.
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Here are some promises I can make to ´óÏó´«Ã½ audiences.
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- The key factual strands everyone loves will still be an important part of the future.
- We are committed to:
- Remaining the biggest investor by far in original British comedy.
- Showing the greatest range of drama of any broadcaster in the world.
- Showcasing the best performing talent in our entertainment.
- Commissioning factual content that contributes to the necessary literacies of modern life: scientific literacy, civic literacy, cultural literacy, life-skills literacy and so on.
- Continuing to invest in world-class centres of excellence in our programme-making base - natural history, history, science, religion, music and arts, consumer journalism, current affairs and documentaries.
- In our children's channels and the web, continuing to invest in a high level of home grown content that reflects the lives and concerns of British children, and...
- Enriching our output with multi-media content that enriches the experience and builds a living archive that will continue to deliver value to our audiences long after the first transmission.
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If we do all this – and I promise you we will - I do not think that audiences are going to feel short-changed. On the contrary, if we get this right, the audiences are going to notice that the ´óÏó´«Ã½ is delivering more impact – and more value.
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Thank you for listening.
