How TV is set for a revolution
Young upstarts have declared war on the Old Guard media elite – and they plan to tear up the TV rule book. Here Barry Didcock reports on how everything is up for grabs: how we watch TV, what we watch, and who decides what we watch
WELCOME to the new Age of Chaos. If you think the media is confusing now – with streaming TV offering you almost endless choice, the rise of citizen journalism, and the voracious churn of Twitter and Facebook – then believe this: you ain’t seen nothing yet.
And this coming chaos will see the old guard of the media elite pitted against young upstarts who plan to completely alter the face of the media as we know it. The revolution will not only be televised – but television itself will be revolutionised.
The battlefield was set this week in Edinburgh at the International Television Festival. On one side the old guard were there – including the woman introduced as “the most powerful in British television”, BBC content supremo Charlotte Moore – using management-wonk buzz words like “distinctiveness” and “demographics”.
On the other side there was the enfant terrible of new media – a man epitomising a different D-word altogether: “disruption”. Shane Smith, the 46-yearold founder of Vice Media, was there to provide the festival’s keynote speech, the MacTaggart Lecture, and used it to declare revolution.
“There is a revolution going on in media, and it’s scary, and it’s fast, and it’s going to be ugly,” said Smith, whose organisation has brought an in-yourface punk ethic to publishing and, increasingly, to news gathering. “But it’s also totally necessary to keep going forward … Change has never been more important, never so crucial.”
Smith said he foresaw a period of chaos in which only the “most nimble and dynamic companies” would thrive, where even new media organisations would struggle and which would prove particularly taxing for what he called “legacy” media. With some relish he noted the end of the baby boomers’ grip on media power and hailed the rise of a young, ethnically-diverse and globally-connected audience which has different priorities, concerns and demands. This audience’s “passion points”, as he calls them, are music, the environment, the economy and LGBT issues. And it’s partly the mainstream media’s inability to tackle these subjects appropriately which has informed Vice’s decision to launch its own TV channel, Viceland. Coming soon, as they say.
“We all know that a lot of media is derivative,” Smith added. “We just make what has been successful before. The reason why all this chaos in media is happening is because the new audience, the new purchasing power, realises that vapid and vacuous s**t isn’t going to get us to where we need to go.
“So let’s break some rules. And here’s a good place to start: open s**t up. Media today is like a private club, so closed that most young people feel disenfranchised. You have to hand it over to the kids.”
What “the kids” make of that injunction – and by that Smith means the so-called millennials, or Generation Y – remains to be seen.
But there was a predictably combative response from the “grown-ups” – the old guard running those same “legacy” media outlets. Speaking at the Leaders’ Debate and asked what he made of Smith’s speech, ITV’s director of television Kevin Lygo won applause when he said: “I’m trying not to use the word ‘odious’”.
Standing beside him on the platform were Moore, Channel 4’s Jay Hunt, Gary Davey of Sky and Channel 5 head Ben Frow, who also went in to bat for the old guard. “It’s so easy to be dismissive and say ‘ Oh television’s boring and we don’t take risks’,” he said. “[But] you have to balance creativity and risk with some fundamental grunt work, those shows which are maybe less exciting but deliver viewers and reward viewers week in, week out.”
As if to underscore Smith’s assault on how old-fashioned and derivative TV is, Moore launched a defence of her upcoming sitcom season, which includes revivals of Porridge and Are You Being Served?. She also took issue with a mooted proposal to make the BBC disclose the salaries of its highest earners. “I don’t think it’s in the licence fee payers’ interests,” she said, while Lygo called it “a mean-spirited, nosy way of looking at things”.
But the over-arching theme of the three-day festival wasn’t how much Gary Lineker is paid or the rights
and wrongs of reintroducing Mrs Slocombe’s pussy to the national discourse. Instead it was the seismic shift in TV-watching patterns which has occurred in the past few years as young people desert the living room and so-called linear TV to consume content when and where they want it courtesy of tablets and mobiles. One speaker spoke of “the cult of the young”. Another referred to a “new world” of digital entertainment. A third used the phrase a “new world order”, echoing Smith’s talk of “revolution”.
Figures thrown at Moore and Co by panel host Martha Kearney, and repeated by Kirsty Wark at a Question Time session which also featured representatives of Channel 4 and the BBC, show the extent of the problem. The average age of viewers of BBC One and Two combined is 62. For ITV and Channel 4 it’s 60 and 55 respectively. For Channel 5, it’s 58. E4 only manages an average viewer age of 42. Compare that to on-demand service Netflix, where the average UK subscriber is between 18 and 34.
One disruptive new player hoping to prove its nimbleness and dynamism – to use Smith’s yardstick for survival – is Amazon Studios, the television wing of Amazon. Among its recent hits are The Man In The High Castle and the Golden Globe and Emmy award-winning Transparent. Like rival Netflix, with its own hits like House Of Cards and Stranger Things, it has a huge library of content and commissions original drama series which are available to watch all at once, for those who binge-view.
In a session under the EITF’s Gamechanger strand, Amazon Studios’ head Roy Price spoke about its latest slate of productions – including Woody Allen’s first foray into television, a six-parter – and about the qualities it looks for in new dramas.
“The key to standing out in such a busy environment is to have a voice that people care about and is really distinctive,” he said. “You can’t deduce what the next zeitgeisty thing is going to be, but I can almost guarantee it will be from a visionary creator who’s really passionate about something new and interesting. So that’s what we tend to focus on. And if something isn’t slightly controversial and you’re not a little worried about it, then maybe it’s boring and passé. Maybe it’s ordinary. And the thing is, the returns on ordinary are declining. It’s got to be amazing. It’s got to be worth talking about.”
YouTube is another internet giant moving into original content production and disrupting our notion of what television is. In common with Vice, which has inked a deal with The Times Of India, YouTube has an eye on one of the world’s biggest emerging markets and has built a high-tech television production studio in Mumbai to match others in Berlin, Paris, Tokyo and London (a 20,000sqft facility in King’s Cross).
As well as winning the prize for the best media buzzwords – “channelisation”, “rearchitecturing” and “game bros” all featured in his EITF session – YouTube’s Alex Carloss introduced the video platform’s new premium channel, YouTube Red, and unveiled some of the original content being made in those state-of-the-art studio spaces.
Among the 12-strong slate of titles already launched (but not yet available in the UK) are shows fronted by people like PewDiePie (the world’s top-earning YouTube star according to Forbes Magazine) and Joey Graceffa (1.2 billion views and counting).
YouTubeRed is also pulling traditional content into its orbit. Another project Calross unveiled was “an episodic reimaging” of the Step Up film franchise, to be produced with film company Lionsgate and the star of the films, Channing Tatum.
But he did have some good news for ITV and Channel 4 as they contemplate this fast-changing landscape and an audience unlike any they have ever had to cater for.
“I think BBC and ITV are brands that this [new] audience recognises. If you consider us a technology platform with a valuable brand associated with it, it’s really the partners that sit on top of that platform that have the ability to build their audiences and they can be from the world of television.”
In other words if the established channels “lean in” (his words) to partnerships with new platforms, they can thrive. “The BBC, ITV, Vice, Awesomeness, [YouTube stars] Casey Neistat, Tyler Oakley and Bethany Mota – they can all co-exist.”
So, radical and disruptive as this new world order may be, don’t throw away your TV remote just yet. You’ll still need it in the Age of Chaos – at least for a while.