Old wine, new bottles (or why it will pay to be young in TV)

Iplayer, Hulu, Vimeo and Youtube have made it manifestly evident that TV is facing a huge challenge from the web, not just for revenues and mindshare but also as an alternative channel to market. But it’s not just a quantitative ‘cheap and many’ channels issue; there’s likely to be a profound qualitative change in how we watch television that threatens the value of things that conventional TV people hold as given: things like scheduling, channel brands and the primacy of television commissioning.

I’ve noticed that when TV execs talk about ipTV they focus on the pipe and the device and assume that the content and the viewing experience will stay much the same (a mass media experience). I came away from The Guardian’s Changing Broadcast summit at the Mayfair Hotel last week with the strong impression that they believe that by pushing event-based TV and ‘combining the creative skills of UK TV production with the ubiquity of the UK digital market’ they can confront the multiple threats they face from digital.

I think it would be interesting to mull over these questions first:

• How can the value of scheduling and channel brands remain intact when we make decisions about what to watch (whatever, whenever) by what our friends and other people we trust are watching?
• What happens when national barriers fall down (and I can watch Hulu in the UK and BBC iplayer in France)?
• How will a long tail of television (with geographic spread, not just historic) change what I watch and how I decide what to watch and the habits I fall into?
• What will be the impact of more access to shortform have on TV viewing behaviour (just check out five.tv/fwd).
• When I can respond instantly to what I’m seeing, in lots of different ways to different people or just everybody watching with me, over an interface that’s easy to use, how might my viewing habits and – just as interestingly – TV formats change? (And has the failure of red button created a false sense of security?).

My guess is that across diverse viewing contexts and audience segments some very wide differences in behaviour, formats, channel branding and tv discovery will emerge.

It’s easy for the hangover of a lifetime of past perceptions to shroud us from future reality. It’s interesting that most of the people adopting the comforting approach that nothing will fundamentally change were over the age of 40.  At the end of the day there was a panel of thirtysomethings representing Endemol Digital, RDF Digital, Channel 4, BBC3 and Bebo with a completely different mindset because they started their careers at a time when the old models were already looking tired. Here are some refreshing snippets:

“Everything done on television is done online simultaneously – commissioning is multiplatform” (BBC3)

“What success is like is really hard to get at” (BBC3)

“We are experimenting to try to find out which models work” (Bebo)

“The web allows us to challenge the old model where we got paid by the cost of what we made, rather than by its value” (RDF)

and most intelligently of all:

“We’re having to learn very fast to keep up with the audience”.