On Friday 28th August the Magic Milestones team journeyed to Edinburgh for the International Television Festival to immerse ourselves in the current thoughts and activities of the broadcast media sector. The festival consisted of two and a half days of sessions on many topics from digitizing archives, to David Simon talking about The Wire, to the James Murdoch’s MacTaggart lecture to a debate on TV and Politics and the end of the ’spin cycle’.
I’m sure each Magic Milestones team member had their own Festival highlight but for me it was hearing David Simon discuss the creative process that produced The Wire as he stressed that none of the writers involved were ‘from television’ which has ultimately lead to the creation of the second best drama series on TV (I think The Sopranos pips it to the post but it’s still excellent) and then contrasting Simon’s sentiments about the societal results of free market capitalism with James Murdoch’s lecture which posited the opposite view - that ‘the only reliable, durable, and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit.’ The contrast between the two positions was also mentioned by Dominic West when he accepted an award for The Wire at the Channel of the Year award on Saturday night. The awards were hosted by Michael Macintyre who was hilarious and it’s hard to not laugh with someone who manages to find everything funny and introduced some welcome levity to the Festival. He also just looks funny 
Heather Brook at the Edinburgh Television Festival
Conversations about the BBC’s dominance in the UK broadcast media space and its impact and potential top-slicing plans featured strongly throughout the Festival which detracted a little from its ‘International’ title as the licence fee funding model is a strictly local issue - if such a thing can exist in our online media age. I have to mention the funding issue as it really did dominate conversations but the more interesting topic to our MM group was the changing platform of media - archiving and the complicated rights model, TV on demand and audience behaviour/expectation. The media industry is at the cusp of where other industries like banking found itself 10 years ago (and this is not a comment on the economy for a change!). Technological innovations weren’t, and aren’t, imposed upon ‘the masses’ but come from within ‘the masses’ in most cases. Ie., no-one sold ‘the internet’ to people. Users needed to be able to bank online and communicate with their banks, colleagues, friends, and schools etc. electronically and businesses adapted their practices and developed the applications that allowed the users to do that. The same thing is happening with media and users want to be able to watch TV on demand, listen live and catch up with programmes that they missed. The ability to do these things and the technology to enable it is not new (iPlayer has been released for 18 months and set top boxes were being developed at least 10 years ago (probably longer, I’m not an expert but that’s when they came to my attention in my day-to-day life) but the business model for the broadcast media is at the point where it’s desperately trying to catch up. The platform for consuming media is changing fast and the business practices of rights management and pay walls are still being thrashed out.
The digital revolution of media is also discussed (with a lot more passion) on this blog http://simsblog.typepad.com/simsblog/2009/09/top-10-lies-newspaper-execs-are-telling-themselves.html which is interesting for its tech-driven view. I don’t agree with all of the thoughts expressed, such as ‘I believe that a large percentage of online readers are content to read someone else’s analysis of the news rather than the news itself’ but it’s an interesting read for a techno viewpoint (I should probably disagree in the comments on the blog itself but I’m a bit scared by its angry tone! They might savage me and neither side of the debate is really dealing in facts, just opinion it would seem, so I’m staying at a distance :-S)
The philosophical concepts of scarcity and quality and economics of broadcast media are being debated alongside the rapidly changing methods of consumption and audience expectation and it was quite exciting to be party to the debates at Edinburgh this year.
We had a bit of a scheduling dilema as Ashley Highfield of Microsoft and formerly BBC Future Media was presenting at the same time as David Simon, creator of the Wire. His talk was a call to action to the wider media industry, predicting that in 2 years time, TV will have its “iTunes moment” where consumption moves from traditional broadcast platforms to the web.
There’s full coverage of this talk on the guardian’s festival coverage:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/aug/29/ashley-highfield-edinburgh-tv-festival
Carrying on from Cindy’s point regarding the financial industry parallel, what got me jumping up and down in my seat throughout the festival was the continuous assertion from TV big wigs that the internet was something “being done” to the Broadcast industry making me think that perhaps they had it far too easy for far too long. I recall a fired up Alice Taylor http://www.wonderlandblog.com delivering this message to a Channel 4 audience back in 2005. She quoted from a BBC/TNS piece of research that presented a startling view of the media world where 6- 10 year olds ranked watching television as only their 3rd most valued medium with video books and thanks heavens, reading books coming 1st and 2nd.
In short, we all got lazy thinking that C4, ITV and BBC had such great brands that they would always come through in the multi-platform, multi-channel world when actually those brands have less of an emotional tug for the new generation.
However, on an upbeat note, it does mean that programmes and films might be judged in their own right according to their own brands and creativity (such is the impact of the long tail) but without the guiding hand of the afore mentioned institutions the “Cult of the Amateur” (Andrew Keen) http://andrewkeen.typepad.com/the_great_seduction/2006/10/my_book_now_not.html is in danger of crowding out true quality programmes and films.
In short, all major broadcasters now have to stop acting like victims and re-discover the value of what they provide and find a way of communicating this to the masses.
Otherwise the cult of the amateur and not the internet per se will indeed kill television as we know and love it.