Versatile Amphibian

Let me get this out here right now: there are some awesome TVs  at CES this year. Never has the industry been bigger and bolder. Slim, sexy, 4K affairs drip from every surface of the megabooths at Sony, LG, Panasonic and others. But one OEM is the boss man of TV bling. You want OLED? You want SUHD and QUANTUM DOTS ? You want 170"? Samsung's got that, yo! "The World's Largest 170" TV" screams the advert for TVZilla, which looms on one entire wall of a darkened, reverential space in their city block-sized temple to screens. The colour from all of those independently-lit pixels is so bright that it leaves afterimages when you break the trance and look away. It's a monster; a poster giant for the industry's latest acronym: HDR. HDR, for the uninitiated (read: well adjusted) is all about luminosity. It stands for High Dynamic Range and basically means that the pixels on the screen are able to stretch from true black (i.e. the absence of brightnes...

About 10 days ago my team and I published an analysis of the creative challenges for UK TV. Our concerns were that the creative basis of our TV economy was being damaged, despite an environment of increasing revenues, driven by TV's role in reinforcing the telecoms market through triple and quad-play bundling. What we found was troubling. Although revenues are indeed up by 10% since 2012, our share of global TV revenues has fallen and that the entire of the revenue increase can be accounted for by sports rights. As we showed in our 2013 Royal Television Society report , sports rights spending flows straight through the industry into the rights bodies, clubs and players, rather than into new skills, ideas and creative formats. And the worst is yet to come: the new Champions League and Premier League rights deals add more than a billion pounds a year onto the rights budget, so unless revenues increase new funding sources will be required if net spending on new creative content is t...

A number of people have asked for a transcript of my speech from this year's RTS Cambridge on the future of TV. Here's the edited highlights (because the visual gags just don't work in text ;) ) ---START--- What television is today is little changed from a decade ago; and, at the same time, TV is profoundly different:   A decade ago , the majority of TV sets sold were 25 inches or smaller. [i]   16 million homes received analogue TV signal. [ii]   Sixty per cent of the country only had five channels. [iii]   High Definition TV was yet to launch. Netflix was a US based company that used the post to distribute DVDs to its 1.5 million customers. [iv]   YouTube had not been founded.   Google – who’d buy Youtube for $1.65 billion in 2006 - had just broken the $1 billion revenue barrier, for the first time. [v] There were two million broadband households [vi] …   … but broadband speeds started at 128 Kbit/s , that’s one eighth of a ...

I was invited to speak at a DPA event on online video news this morning. Here's a synopsis of my session, which focused on the form online video news may take in the future. Video makes up about 60% of the traffic on the Internet. Outside of Asia, Youtube alone is nearly 20% of total traffic. TV viewing hours in Europe are holding steady at about four hours per day; in the UK about three quarters of consumers view the TV as their primary source of world news. So video remains at the core of the entertainment proposition in 2013; however it's worth reflecting that historically online and broadcast video have been profoundly different. TV is professionally produced, broadcast in high quality in a curated experience that consists of relatively small amounts of video. Online video, by contrast, is of generally low quality. It is produced by amateurs in massive volumes and is typically aggregated automatically on a small number of sites. This was the situation until Steve Jobs...

I was lucky enough to attend this year’s Royal Television Society Conference at the Barbican and am in the process of sharing my notes from the event. This is number 3 in the series. Having heard about the Olympic Games in the morning, the first afternoon session at RTS focused on games with a small “g”. The panel discussion was hosted by Ed Vaizey – Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries. Vaizey has the odd punchy one-liner, but it strikes me that he knows little about the sector besides an obviously poor quality briefing before the session. I doubt that he plays games or watches much TV, for that matter. The rest of the panel consisted of Sefton Hill, from Rocksteady Studios, Steven Moffat – the writer of Doctor Who and Merlin, no less - and Henrique Olifiers of Bossa Studios. Console gaming and TV The panel discussion was rather rambling. These notes therefore pick out the recognisable subjects rather than attempting to be comprehensive. [The first thing ...

I’m of the belief that participants in the TMT industry need to read widely in order to understand the present and future dynamics of the market. To that end, this post is a collection of the articles that have caught my eye. This week: Amazon goes Dickensian, films in the living room, social effects of the NHS robot leg and Star Wars takes on Star Trek Digital media I’m yet to be convinced that audiences are presently ready for Zeebox’s brand of second screen, but in case they are, Zeebox have partnered with Chyron to offer polls, sampling and other measurement tools on their application. http://thenextweb.com/media/2012/09/10/zeebox-integrate-new-tools-allowing-broadcasters-interact-directly-users-via-second-screen-app/ Tablet use does, however, increase linear TV viewing, 39% of users say they watch more versus 15% who watch less. http://www.rapidtvnews.com/index.php/2012091224033/ipad-kindle-fire-and-other-tablets-drive-greater-tv-viewing.html Kindle Serials is a really i...

September is a busy month in UK TV, with the Media Guardian Edinburgh International TV Festival in late August, followed in close order by IBC in Amsterdam and the RTS annual conference   at the end of the month . TV remains the most influential media in the UK and in large parts of the rest of the world, so it deserves special attention. With apologies for the small advertising pitch, since I've had a (small) hand in the reports that Deloitte prepares for these important events, I thought I'd provide links to them as they're released. First up, our annual Edinburgh Festival report, which answers questions such as "why we whinge about what's on TV and keep on watching" and "why a trillion TV ads matter". It's based on ongoing primary research into audience preferences and is definitely worth a read if you make TV, advertise on it or just want to know why you watch and whether you're typical. Download it here .

Comscore just released their latest numbers for European Internet usage . Two things stood out for me. First, the UK has maintained its position as the most online and the most engaged European country. Despite the size of the base, the UK is also one of the fastest growing markets in terms of engagement. Of major developed countries only Sweden had a faster growth in engagement (14% YoY growth plays 9%); Russia and eastern European countries continue to grow strongly but from a very low base of online engagement. The average online audience member in the UK now spends one and a quarter hours a day online, which brings me to my second point. Although viewing fell very slightly this year (pre-Olympics, it must be said), live TV occupies an average of 4 hours and 1 minute a day of everyone's time. And 90% of this content was consumed live, despite more than 50% of the population now owning a DVR . So live TV, the medium that has been "dying" since the late '80...