The Broadcaster shakeup
Published by on August 31st, 2006
If there’s one clear message from the rise of this thing we currently call podcasting (both audio and video) the traditional media industry needs to pay attention to, it’s that the secret is out: creating content people want to watch or listen to is not as hard or expensive to produce as they’ve led us to believe all these years.
I had a conversation last week with a guy who recently proposed a children’s animation concept to the BBC. The primary reason he was turned down, after plenty of discussion and negotiation, was because the proposed production cost per episode was a third of the cost the BBC had decided would be necessary.
Hold on a minute… he was turned down because his budget, based on the costs he knew it would take his small, self-contained team to produce the programmes, was too low? I don’t see credit rolls on television programmes getting any shorter and with that attitude it’s not surprising.
The proof will be in the pudding, or at least the RSS feed. If there’s a big interest in the - mostly, let’s be honest - less sophisticated programming currently offered by podcasting, then traditional big media companies are going to have to change their attitudes and become a little less aloof about the process of creating entertaining content. Because that’s all it will become: content. Whether ‘podcast’, broadcast, shipped, streamed, or posted on a disk, it’s all just content.
Viewers do not care how it was created or for how much - except perhaps in the case of the BBC where we all in the UK are forced to pay for it - they just care whether it’s something they like or not. If not, there’s plenty more to choose from, move along now*.
There’s one downside to this however, and it’s already happening as a result of the multitude of digital channels needing to fill airtime as cheaply as possible. The money has to be spread wider, and therefore more experienced, skilled, and thefore expensive people are likely to be ousted in preference to cheaper, hungry, just-out-of-college wannabies who will work all hours for a packet of pork scratchings.
Whichever way the public decides to consume its entertainment, there’s a shake-up coming.
* OK, so there are a chunk of listeners/viewers more than happy to watch what they loathe in order to have a reason to complain about it, but let’s leave them to their own misguided misery.
2 Responses to “The Broadcaster shakeup”
July 21st, 2006 at 9:21 am
I’ve installed it but I don’t see no tag thing added to any part of my email! Annoying..
July 21st, 2006 at 9:24 am
strike that. restarted mail, there it was.
July 21st, 2006 at 1:40 pm
Welcome to the world of email organisation, Mark
August 31st, 2006 at 11:15 pm
“…because the proposed production cost per episode was a third of the cost the BBC had decided would be necessary.”
It is however possible that the BBC, with 80 years of experience, actually does know what things cost! It is quite possible that your friend was not in a position to properly budget this animation simply because he had no experience of producing content for TV. Perhaps the BBC lost confidence because they simply didn’t believe he could pull it off at the price he was quoting - and that would have been a waste of licence payer’s money!
September 1st, 2006 at 9:08 am
Perfectly valid in most cases. These guys, however, although they had not had anthing broadcast previously, had produced broadcast-quality animation programmes and a pilot for this particular concept.
Cost expectations can sometimes be widely off the mark, as I have found in my freelance work. In pitching for a recent, large project, I won it not only because I presented a more viable soution, but also because I was almost 10% of the cost of the highest estimate. Traditional expectation can generate closed-minded attitudes in a changing industry and hide real potential.