With budgets being tightened and with marketers seemingly obsessed by the supposed accountability of digital media, the future of TV should theoretically be rather bleak. If you believe all the data, we are spending more time playing games, using social networks, surfing the internet on our smartphone and yet TV is still managing to bringing record audiences.
There are several discussions to be had around the effectiveness and future of the medium. There are few evangelists left that seriously believe that digital media spells the end of the box, but the TV model is changing massively, as is the way in which we view, measure and interrogate the medium.
In the first of series of articles, Richard Welsh from Bigballs Films discusses the percieved never-ending end of television from a content producer's point of view.
'Friends, kings and the survival of the fittest'
The debate about the perpetual death of traditional television has been going on for so long now that it feels like an almost impossible task to write anything new on the subject. Apart from using the term 'perpetual death', which must be new, and entirely contradictory, but which sort of sums up the problem of perspective - quite simply the issues change depending on who you ask…
To give myself some sort of starting point I asked a few people at varying life stages, including my mother, what they'd say if they had to explain television to an alien.
"Television is a box in your house that you watch for entertainment - something that amuses you, or informs you. What the hell are you asking me this for?"
That was my mother.
"A plastic box filled with endless Friends reruns. Waste of time"
That was a 16 year old… you can almost smell the angst.
Irrespective of the fact that one of these people couldn't care less about Facebook - I'll leave you to decide which one - they both echo the same point… Television isn't BBC or ITV, or Dave, it's a box. And it just so happens that for the past few decades that box has been, almost exclusively, the cosy home for a bunch of broadcasters who've had it all their own way, who've decided what you watch, when you watch it and who for the most part have fought tooth and nail to keep it that way at the expense of seeing the bigger picture.
Facebook is a monster, but who knows if it will still be around in ten years. It probably will, and you'll probably be using it to check in to new countries instead of your passport. But that's not the point - the world has changed, and just as Professor Brian Cox so eloquently describes in Wonders of the Universe (excellent work BBC), the arrow of time dictates there's no turning back, we can only look forward.
I've worked for traditional TV production companies, both in production and development of shows, I've worked with agencies and direct to brands. And now at Bigballs Films I'm doing all of the above, plus rather brilliantly doing things that rely on none of the above, giving me a different perspective on things.
The biggest problem with big brands and incumbent broadcasters is the ability to say no. Which is fine if you're King of everything you survey, but an entirely different kettle of fish when you're suddenly on a level playing field with a generation of people who don't give a shit how many BAFTAs you've won or how effective last year's global rebrand happened to be.
It's a cliché, but the old adage about the survival of the fittest is apt - brands like Red Bull (15m+ Facebook fans at last count) or teenagers like Charlie McDonnell (800k+ YouTube subscribers) aren't doing anything especially groundbreaking, they're just… doing. They're making content at polar opposite ends of the spectrum… one has Blofeld-like resources, the other has a webcam and occasionally a hat, but they're both in a position to call themselves broadcasters, which if nothing else, should scare the bejesus out of anyone who claims the same.
Against this backdrop, the frustration comes when innovation, risk taking and general ebullience is sacrificed - seemingly substituted for cost cutting, management restructures and endless conferences filled with people with linear mindsets, incapable of thinking differently or at least open to the thought that change might be… whisper it… an opportunity.
Broadcasters like the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Sky One have incredibly strong brands. At their best they make programmes that can make us laugh, make us cry, bring us together or highlight divides, but so far none has truly taken a real leap into the unknown by commissioning a single show that has as much love (and money) thrown at the 'multi-platform' stuff as the thing on your box.
360 programming, transmedia or whatever generic buzz word we're using at the moment isn't about giving all the characters a Twitter feed, or uploading behind- the-scenes content to YouTube or sticking QR codes to some dickhead in Hoxton. It's about approaching a project with an open mind, about working out who the audience is, about what they want, about how to reach them - it's about how best to tell the story in question. It's really quite simple.
When beautifully crafted Channel 4 dramas launch with just over 1m viewers, it seems the opportunity to engage, and build audiences through new methods isn't just an opportunity, it's imperative. At the same time brands are reimagining themselves as 'storytellers' - it doesn't make financial or strategic sense to spend £500k on a 30' ad that viewers can just fast forward through or cut out entirely, so they're having to adapt as well. It doesn't take a genius to see a new generation of shows that don't compromise on editorial integrity, but that include brands that facilitate the telling of that story, who help to engage and build new audiences and who become a seamless part of a narrative, not a product placed oh-so-cleverly in shot.
Which brings us neatly back to the perpetual death contradiction thing… do the broadcasters grow some nuts and really invest in becoming relevant to new audiences on unfamiliar platforms with all the risks that entails, or do they continue to dip their toes nervously in the water, whilst those with no legacy business models plunge into the deep end, making mistakes, but making the new rules as they learn to swim.
I'm sure somebody told me once that every question in life can be related back to a moment in Friends and in the case of discussing the never-ending end of television, it is as Joey points out, "a moo point', it's like a cow's opinion. It just doesn't matter. It's moo."
Richard Welsh is head of development at Bigballs Films. View an example of their work with Vodafone here.