In the constantly shifting landscape of broadcast media it’s very tempting to make predictions and forecasts about where the market is heading. Aspersions are cast, wild speculation takes place but in the end it’s all guess work. The soon forgotten predictions are replaced with each brand launch, new technology and empire building acquisition.
What may be more interesting than looking forward is looking back. In 2004 UKTV published a booklet, ‘TV in 2014 – The Future Isn’t What It Used To Be’. With contributors such as the then chairman of Endemol UK Peter Bazalgette, managing director of Wall to Wall Alex Graham and chairman of Digital UK Stakeholders Group Barry Cox. The collection of essays attempted to describe the changes the most ubiquitous media would endure.
Peter Bazalgette predicted that by trying to appeal to a general audience, the BBC and ITV would lose out long before 2014, mostly to Channel 4 who would be ruling the roost with a 24 hours-a-day Big Brother channel. Appealing to specific demographics and maintaining a commercially attractive ageing audience, Channel 4 was set to become the main commercial network.
The new digital multi-channel world was the focus of other predictions, again envisaging a declining BBC with niche channels whisking away audience viewing. Jane Featherstone foresaw the danger of digital, risking channels blurring in to homogeneous flatness , forcing viewers away from the television set, toward computers.
In a rather vague estimate, Samir Shah, managing director of Juniper, stated: “We can be sure technology will have combined digital television, TiVo, the internet, telephone in ways we cannot yet imagine”.
At least he wasn’t wrong.
Mentions of the ever-pessimistic ‘decline of linear TV’ alongside the dangers of a narrower range of programming coming out of the commissioning process, pale in significance to the noticeable lack of any reference at all to social media. With Facebook in its very early infancy at Harvard in 2004, the influence of social networks was yet to penetrate beyond the PC. With Shazamable ads, indications of programme popularity based on peak and average tweets per minute and increasing targeting of second screening, it’s difficult to imagine the shape of the TV landscape without the integration of some form of social media.
MEC Opinion
To speculate myself on the next 10 years, examining the rate of change in the last decade – barely even touched upon by these predictions –should only fill us with optimism and excitement about where we could go next. Linear TV is forever disproving the cynics, streaming services are growing in impact and viewer engagement is becoming more significant in the ever increasingly digital arena.