On a bright TV future

One always leaves the Edinburgh TV Festival with a hangover. Quite often one leaves annoyed – caught in the inevitable annual row between broadcasting rivals. This year I left believing there has never been a more exciting time to be in television.

Instead of BBC-bashing or Murdoch-hating the guest speaker was Eric Schmidt of Google and we examined how convergence of  traditional TV,  video on demand, social media and the internet will change our lives. I have seen the future and spoken in TV tongues. I am born again. And like all “born-agains” it seems my duty to convert you.

I love TV. I grew up watching lots of it, and I still do. I have little problem with my children watching a fair amount of it too. TV introduced me to the joys of entertainment, the wonder of the natural world, the excitement of debate and politics, the anger of injustice in far away lands. I spent a lot of time talking about TV – everyday at school there was a conversation about anything from the Smurfs (yes they were around back then), The Young Ones (look it up if you’re under 35 or over 55) to who was playing The Tube this week and what Paula Yates would get up to (ditto).  We would swap ideas, opinions, jokes, introduce each other to new things to watch. We used to call it “chatting with friends”. These days you might call it “social networking”.  I still do this, quite a lot. But these days as well as doing it in person I also do it on Twitter or Facebook or Google+.

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In the old days we had a thing called a “video cassette recorder”. Being a family who liked gadgets we had one even back in the 1980s. It was big, heavy, expensive and used a magnetic thing we called “tape” to record on. The picture quality was pretty ropey. If you were not in the room at the time of the programme you wanted to record there was little chance you knew how to set the timer. So you would record things while you watched them. Which though pointless seemed technologically marvellous.

Sometimes we would go out of the room while it was recording then come back in and watch it later – just because we could. Sometimes somebody would borrow a friend’s VCR and copy a tape. This was believed to be risky and possibly illegal, but mostly the problem was that the resulting copy made the picture look like a snow storm and was virtually unwatchable. But we could watch something which wasn’t being broadcast, which wasn’t “on” at the time, something we were in control of. This seemed revolutionary. These days at home I have Sky+ and various computers connected to wireless internet. I can even watch the same TV (live or recorded) that my kids are watching at home at the same time from my iPhone.

So TV has come a long way – but we are essentially doing very similar things to what we were doing 25 years ago albeit with better quality, better choice and faster technology. The next 25 years will make bigger leaps. Already a Tivo box on Virgin cable will suggest things you might like based on what you have watched before and iTunes will suggest movies you might like on past purchases. Expect a lot more of that in the future. New technology means you will have this in a much more advanced way and all in one place should you wish – analysing your TV programmes, films, YouTube or Vimeo videos and guiding you to new content.

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Many of us have already discovered the joys of “Two-screen viewing” – watching TV while social networking on a phone, tablet or laptop. But before long your mobile device will be synchronised to know what you are watching on the TV automatically and guide you to associated websites, additional video content, interactive material and social networking. Google TV is essentially a platform, like Android for smartphones. Developers will devise applications to go alongside all viewing and specific programmes or genres. Apple, Sky, Virgin and others will no doubt do similar things – so expect the same kind of platform wars over your TV set that you’ve seen for your mobile phone.

Live television production will be quite different. As well as filming and making a report for Channel 4 News, we might have a colleague working up additional live web content, be answering viewers questions live while the piece goes out and cutting together responses from protagonists or viewers for use later in the programme. We might be able to deliver an instant online polling response from a database that has already been sifted and weighted to give a reasonable demographic balance. Instant TV polls might actually have some credibility. You the viewer won’t just be a passive consumer – but an active participant in the content. You will be able to much more easily help us gather the news, find things out, suggest people to speak to and find them for us. It has always been an overused cliché – but we really will be on a journey together.  And the possibilities in entertainment and drama are almost endless.

The bigger question about our TV viewing habits remains whether we will rely less on channels – on experts who curate programmes in order over the day for us. The death of the channel was predicted as soon as Sky+, Tivo and other PVRs became popular – it turned out not to be true. Most viewing (around 90 per cent at the last count) is still not time-shifted – but is broadcast channels at the time they are being broadcast.

And I have written before how social media has made the live experience even more important for things like sport, X Factor, political debates and other things where I want the shared experience. If the personalisation of TV becomes more popular channel viewing will be reduced – even if it takes years. But even that doesn’t spell the end for the TV industry. If you don’t require Channel 4 to decide the exact order of what you watch you will still value the kinds of programmes we make. You know what our brand stands for – and the Channel 4 portfolio will be one you want to come to whether on 4oD or an app on your phone, tablet or TV.

So I am excited about the future. Crucially we need to work out how these changes will affect the economics of TV – the advertising market, the licence fee and other mechanisms. Maybe that is what I will consider for my next blog.

Follow @krishgm on Twitter.