The Broadband Opportunity - extract from keynote speech given at Manchester Commissioning Conference
Wednesday 23 November 2005
Printable version
After more than a decade of talk about 'convergence' it feels like we've suddenly achieved full contact. The astonishing pace of broadband take-up is a phenomenon no-one in the TV industry can afford to ignore.
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In the UK we've reached 30 per cent far more quickly than anyone dared to project even three years ago, and in the US the last few months have seen an unprecedented rush by key broadcasters to embrace broadband distribution.
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Cable companies such as MTV and Comedy Central have led the way, but the big networks are getting in on the act with formidable speed, including completely new revenue models that deliver hit series to audiences for, say, 99 cents an episode.
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The young medium of the internet and the older medium of TV find themselves in exactly the same universe now, and each is learning rapid and profound lessons from the other.
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The question is: where do channels fit into this new order? I've been struck by the way most discussions of the broadband and on-demand revolution seem to lead pretty quickly to a prevailing consensus.
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Put simply, this is that channels, with their clunky linear schedules and quaint preoccupation with audience share, are essentially things of the past.
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They may stagger on for a little while into the on-demand future, the argument goes, but they face inevitable disintermediation at the hands of a generation who are surfing, searching, chatting and gaming their way to a perfectly personalised future.
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Now I can make those arguments with the best of them but, for the record, and perhaps provocatively to some, my own view is very different.
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The whole magic of great brands is that they are first and foremost ideas, not things, and the best have an emotional connection with consumers that transcends any particular shape or medium.
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Decades of history and meaning, audience affection and memory don't suddenly disappear the day your house gets wired for broadband.
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The paradigm shifts we face are profound, but my instinct is that the big 'old' media brands will remain landlocked in the age of print, or analogue TV, or whatever, only if we choose to let them be.
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Rupert Murdoch realises this, which is why - belatedly, as he admits himself - he is challenging his newspaper editors to wake up to the power of the web, and buying heavily into key internet start-ups, from video search to social software.
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In the case of a brand such as ´óÏó´«Ã½ TWO, we have spent more than four decades engaging with audiences and building a potent idea of a special kind of TV.
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Programmes on ´óÏó´«Ã½ TWO are characterised by rich content and a long afterlife – exactly the qualities that can thrive in the emerging universe.
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In some of the on-demand TV trials earlier this year we were surprised by how strongly a specialist documentary strand such as Horizon stood out in the rankings – a classic 'long tail' of deep interest, where success plays itself out over a much longer timespan than we're used to in TV.
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Equally revealing was the way that Adam Curtis's series The Power of Nightmares was massively pirated across the internet immediately after broadcast – an indicator of pent-up hunger for surprisingly demanding material.
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Just imagine, we thought, if you could harness that hunger, by directly engaging the full force of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ TWO brand with the power of the broadband internet.
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It may sound ambitious, but I believe that ´óÏó´«Ã½ TWO in the broadband age could flourish in ways that were unimaginable in the first 40 years of its existence.
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Subject to the necessary approvals and consents, a broadband channel could of course offer simulcast programming and the kind of comprehensive catch-up currently being piloted in the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Player tests.
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But there's more to it than that, and you'll see our first steps on this journey next year, as in partnership with colleagues across the ´óÏó´«Ã½ we radically upgrade our website to meet the exponentially growing expectations of the broadband audience.
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The pilot project which for want of a better phrase I call our 'broadband edition' is intended as a real-time experiment to test what it means to shift the whole mindset of a big channel brand into the internet space.
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Even in the earliest stages of the project, what's been fascinating is how profoundly we've found ourselves rethinking some of the most basic ideas about what a 'channel' is.
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There's the whole relationship with the audience, for a start. How close do we dare get to them? Do we share bad news as well as good? Do we show them our work in progress, and let them actively shape the direction of the channel and contribute to its content?
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It's already clear that we have to be far more open and connective than we've ever been before, linking audiences far and wide across the web in ways that reflect the astonishing range of the channel.
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Then there's the whole question of how text and video will work together in this emerging medium.
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We already feel the emergence of a whole new creative skillset, where video production flair and copywriting talent will spark off each other to conjure new kinds of entertainment and editorial experiences.
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What will they create? How will it change what we do on the linear channel?
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It's been interesting to see the way in which Newsnight's highly entertaining broadband edition, which is both video-rich and intensely verbal and argumentative, has begun to directly influence the character of the on-air show.
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And, of course, out of this whole process will come a distillation of a new ´óÏó´«Ã½ TWO, more personal, lighter on its feet, constantly attuned to its audiences, with a look, tone and navigational style that will simply make no distinction between the realm of the internet and that of broadcast television.
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Building this 21st century version of the channel is a formidable creative challenge, but a formidably exciting one.
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Being a pioneer is deep in the DNA of ´óÏó´«Ã½ TWO. It was the first 'alternative' channel in Britain, the first to launch colour TV, and – we now know – will in 2008 be the first analogue channel to make the switch into a purely digital world.
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Whatever the broadband revolution means for audiences and channels in the future, we intend to be there, in the front line.
