On Wednesday (14/01/09) I was at the Westminster eForum at a keynote seminar on a new report due out this year on Digital Britain. Lord Stephen Carter, Minister, Communications, Technology and Broadcasting was outlining what he felt were the key issues that Britain needed to respond to to stay ahead in a new digital future. He did not reveal a great deal about the substance of the report but did raise some interesting points and emphasised that it is very clear that digital is critical to the future of Britain in an ever developing global economy.
The Panel
He outlined that he was looking for legislation to make it a legal right for everyone to have access to at least 2MB broadband in every home in the UK by 2012. A bold vision but one which may bring the infrastructure to its knees if we continue to follow the trend towards greater use of video content on-line. A typical HD film downloaded over the Internet is like downloading 35,000 web pages. A country downloading this type of content will quickly eat up any bandwidth and this trend is increasing.
He raised points about finding an alternative to the BBC long term and opening it up to more to competition which was later picked up on by John Tate – Director of Policy and Strategy at the BBC who spoke about the possibility of opening up the iPlayer (which receives about 40 million programme requests a month) to other public service channels including iTV, Channel 4 and Channel 5. He went on to talk further about how this may work through the implementation of project canvas which is a joint venture between the BBC, iTV and BT to combine terrestrial and web based TV into the TV in the lounge.
Carolyn McCall – CEO of Guardian Media Groups said that there was severe difficulties for regional reporting because of convergence. She went on to say that the role and dominance of aggregators was damaging the quality of reporting and that the current model for providing local journalism was becoming uneconomic, reducing the incentive for commercial players to get involved.
This did feel a little like sour grapes to be frank. It felt like she was complaining about the fact that the media industry is fragmenting and consumers are now finding their news from other channels. This suggested that it is impacting their sales of both advertising and the news papers and as a group they are not happy about it.
The whole media industry is changing and all journalists and content providers need to get used to this because it is not going to change. The BBC is a great example of an organisation who is recognising this and actually looking to find ways to engage with their consumers in a new way.
I would argue that if the on-line public really felt that the quality of the content they were being provided was genuinely better than what they can find through aggregators or other on-line channels then commercial publishers should have nothing to worry about. Unfortunately the reality is that often its not. What is very clear to me is that as more people are encourage to migrate on-line (which I think is fantastic) through the governments policies, there will continue to be a change in how society consumes information and entertainment content. There is too much other “good” content out there for the mediocre to have a voice and compete. Only exceptional organisations that can change quickly and provide a genuine differentiated offering are going to survive in the new world Lord Carter has painted – and rightly so.
It will be interesting to see what is in the rest of the report.
Filed under: Marketing, Opinion, BBC, Carolyn McCall, Digital Britain, John Tate, Lord Stephen Carter, Marketing, Project Canvas, Technology, Trends
