Unexpected Media

Future perspectives

I’ve moderated two panels this week taking different perspectives on the future of television.

At Zero-One in London on Tuesday night as part of a seminar on interactive tv Scott Gronmark and Marc Goodchild, two of the key figures in the development of the BBC’s red-button services, argued that the achievements of the past 7 or 8 years were not inconsiderable. Scott agreed that the golden era for enhancement of broadcast programmes driven by the fast text keys might already be over, but suggested that with audiences for some services reaching 8 million or more, the investment of talent, time and licence fee resources had not been wasted.

Marc, one of the very few established linear tv producers with a real commitment to new media said that despite the limitations inherent in the technology, the new platforms had given producers the ability to craft personalised experiences for television viewers. He gave the example of Sleep, which is perhaps the only BBC documentary to have been conceived from the very beginning as a fully interactive show. He conceded that the BBC had taken an analogue model into the establishment of their fully digital channels.

Dan Campbell is Head of Interactive at MTV in London. Despite imaginative and apparently successful experiments with red-button interactivity, it had been very difficult to justify the additional cost of providing the enhancements and MTV stopped doing interactive television a couple of years ago. In fact, Dan questioned the relevance of TV as a whole for his core demographic of 16 to 24 year olds who today have a radically different relationship with media from previous generations. Their preferred mode is to be online at a PC from which they engage in three types of behaviour: they chat, they google and they browse YouTube. When they find something cool, they share it with their friends. A broadcaster cannot expect to persuade that kind of user to see a television channel as a destination; the challenge now is to take the experience of the brand to the user.

The International Documentary Festival in Amsterdam (IDFA) launched a new initiative yesterday: the DocAgora which will be a nomadic meeting of documentary makers exploring how to translate their practice to new media. The plan is that it should become a feature of documentary festivals and markets around the world.

I moderated the first DocAgora panel in Amsterdam’s unique church turned club, music venue and conference hall, the Paradiso. I was faced with the challenge of creating the illusion of coherent dialogue amongst seven panellists from disparate backgrounds in just one hour. My main concern was to ensure that the debate went beyond exploring how the auteur/film-maker can exploit digital platforms to find new ways of distributing their work. While that’s a legitimate question, the (for the most part) socially engaged artists, producers and directors who attend events like IDFA have to go beyond what they know already and discover new strategies for using new media to offer new perspectives and stimulate debate around issues.

The most eloquent advocate of this new way of looking at the craft of documentary making was Pat Aufderheide of the Center for Social Media in Washington, DC. She suggested that the makers should see themselves as strategic co-ordinators of many faceted media experiences, making appropriate use of a balance or linear and participatory experiences. For Pat the key question is what how will the public space in media be shaped in the future. It’s not just a question for the incumbents: the broadcasters will work out how to adapt or they won’t survive. We need to look beyond the current models of public service media organisations to ways of organising, funding, creating and distributing which reflect the radically changed media-scape.