New tube
By Matt Cooney,
Idealog May/June 2007, page 60
More screens, more channels, more choices—television is being reinvented by new technology and new ventures. That all adds up to more opportunity for creative Kiwis prepared to think outside the box
For decades, we’ve arranged our lives around our TVs. We try to make it home before the sports news comes on. Get the kids to bed before The Sopranos starts. We know not to phone the in-laws while Desperate Housewives is screening and we cook dinner in time to watch Eating Media Lunch. Look forward to work on Tuesday morning so we can discuss who got the boot from Idol.
You might not be able to set your watch by the telly but you can certainly organise your free time around it, and millions of people do. That’s television: scheduled, reliable, predictable. When TV One cut short an episode of Coronation Street in 2004 to cover a hostage crisis at a Russian school, viewers were quick to complain. What can you rely on if not Coro?
But now we’re taking the idiot out of the idiot box. TV isn’t just on the living-room telly on the half-hour; it’s on gaming consoles, phones, PCs, TiVo and MySky, and new gadgets arriving all the time. It’s available in high-definition or low-definition, high-cost or no-cost, delivered over the airwaves or over a wire. It comes in interactive flavours or authentic couch-potato. New TV services are usually on-demand and they’re always digital.
All these new channels have something in common: they need content. Producers are creating new kinds of programmes for the new broadcasters and webcasters. Contracts are being redrawn for new platforms and new markets. And new channels are springing up for amateur and niche productions.
“I’ve been in the business for 30 years and everyone is always talking about change as just around the corner,” says Dave Gibson of the Gibson Group. “But it’s just suddenly arrived … it’s an amazing time. It’s game on.”
TVNZ has spent years planning the launch of a digital free-to-air channel and will finally get its way when FreeView launches in May. But the broadcaster has already gone digital, courtesy of a skunkworks project called Ondemand that was unveiled in March. Ondemand is a TV-over-the-Internet service (commonly called IPTV) that offers a mix of current shows and some gems from the broadcaster’s massive archive.
Ondemand is the most obvious example of a sea change in thinking at TVNZ. The broadcaster has just completed a five-year strategy and decided its purpose in life is “inspiring New Zealanders on every screen,” says Jason Paris, TVNZ’s head of emerging business. “How we’re going to do that is by getting great programming and putting it where and when New Zealanders want it. It’s a fundamental change for us as a business, moving away from an analogue television network to, I suppose, a content distributor [and] aggregator model.”
The TV business is changing from broadcasters pushing content to viewers “having greater control and actually pulling content through,” he says. It’s not a trend that traditional broadcasters can afford to ignore. There are plenty of new entrants who will be happy to eat their lunch. The most obvious is YouTube, which today offers up a lo-fi mixture of ripped-off recordings and amateur video (ranging from the inane to the inspired) but which could become a global one-stop shop for video.
In the US, Viacom (which owns MTV and Comedy Central) and Google (which owns YouTube) are in court battling over copyright—a case that should decide how content will be controlled on the Internet and what it’s worth. In Europe, Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, the inventors of the Skype Internet phone system and Kazaa filesharing software, are putting the finishing touches on their new Internet broadcasting platform, Joost—the best-known of a whole clutch of IPTV startups with Web 2.0 names like Zattoo and Babelgum. Current, a social television network chaired by Al Gore, is broadcasting on satellite, cable and the Internet and says it will pay for content from its viewers. Apple has just launched Apple TV, which plays movies and TV programmes from iTunes (it was almost immediately hacked to run Joost), and Microsoft has promised to offer IPTV through its Xbox 360 gaming console later in the year.
All this means programmes can be developed for new platforms and new markets, can have a longer shelf-life with on-demand IPTV and potentially new licensing opportunities. And because the technology is advancing rapidly and content producers are starting to think outside the box, there’s room for new broadcasters too.
Each two-minute episode of My Story will screen nightly on C4 and the next day will be downloaded to mobile phones.
But just how production companies will make money from the new channels is far from clear. Phil Smith of Great Southern Television says he put Eating Media Lunch and The Unauthorised History of New Zealand on TVNZ’s Ondemand to test the waters. “At the moment the revenue model is unknown and so we’ve entered into a relationship on a collaborative basis.”
The Gibson Group is taking a different tack. Last year the Wellington company set up a dedicated mobile content division and it’s currently making My Story, a “byte-sized soap” following a group of young Kiwis with a missing friend. My Story will run in two-minute episodes five nights a week on C4 and TV3, and can be downloaded onto mobile phones the next day.
CanWest and TVNZ are used to having a broadcast ‘window’—the period when they have exclusive rights to a show—last for months if not years. My Story is different. “I said to CanWest: you’ve still got your window, but it only lasts till midnight,” says Gibson. The networks will be following My Story’s success with interest.
The Gibson Group has a long and storied history in New Zealand television, including iconic productions like The Quiet Earth. But the company has learnt that you can’t just deliver the same product to a new medium. Aside from writing scripts that tell a story in two minutes, the crew has learnt how to shoot for small screens. “There’s no point in doing lovely big arty-farty wide shots on a mobile phone if somebody is looking at it on the bus on the way to work or in the playground, so you tend to shoot a bit closer,” Gibson says. “You tend not to have too much panning or rapid movement, because that gives some problems. And you don’t make your backgrounds too complex—you don’t use wanky wallpapers and things like that.”
It’s a big change from trying to add a bit of lo-fi ‘realism’ in post-production. “In a funny way it’s almost going backwards … all of a sudden what we have to do is just make a clean, bright, simple production.”
The result is in-your-face drama, on screens of whatever size. But will punters actually pay for it? They may not have to. Gibson has struck a deal with the Family Planning Association to sponsor the series and, if negotiations with the telcos go well, reckons it may even be a free download to phones. “That younger mobile phone audience is not one that will fork out a lot of money for content,” he says. “They expect content to be either free or cheap.”
Of course, it’s not just Kiwi content producers who are taking advantage of new media opportunities. On the top floor of a Parnell office block, serial IT entrepreneur Craig Meek is a few days away from publicly announcing his latest venture when Idealog visits. Meek’s company, Go Virtual Sports, has built an interactive IPTV system called Desktop TV that will run overnight to bring America’s Cup fans their yachting fix when they awake, complete with high-quality footage and commentary.
The system has to deal gracefully with a heap of issues, from securing the rights to footage, dealing with the inevitable network issues, encrypting the licensed audio and video content, setting up an office in Valencia to compile, relay and report, and building an IPTV infrastructure to package and deliver around 60 megabytes of new data to Kordia (the former BCL) for overnight distribution to each computer desktop. Of course, this all has to be idiot-proof for users and ready for the start of racing.
Desktop TV delivers the America’s Cup to computer desktops overnight
Desktop TV was three years in the making; Meek is convinced it’s a world first. His team has tried to hide the technical complexity of IPTV by using a human host, the charming Amelia, to help users through the signup and setup stages. Amelia will be based in Valencia throughout the cup and will remain the ‘face’ of Desktop TV. The player uses a familiar ‘tuner’ metaphor to help the user navigate between sources.
Meek isn’t trying to take on the established sports channels; TVNZ, APN Digital and the Radio Network are content partners. Instead, he’s taking advantage of the interactive nature of the computer desktop to let people view the Cup events as they choose.
Clearly the America’s Cup is just the beginning. We discuss the possibility of Desktop TV coverage of, say, the Rugby World Cup. In the meantime, Meek is paying the bills through a combination of viewer subscriptions, sponsorship and in-player advertising. How about built-in gambling? Sure, says Meek. “This platform will do everything.” If he can prove the concept, a massive market beckons.
“Right now it will be little steps, like New Zealand,” he says. “Then we can do the Super Bowl.”
Both Ondemand and Desktop TV are currently available only in New Zealand, although Paris and Meek are keen to change that. For decades, television rights agreements haven’t taken into account on-demand programming, multiple devices and delivery over the Internet. TVNZ’s licensing department carried a big part of the workload involved in launching Ondemand.
Ondemand was something of a rush job for TVNZ, but Paris says his team has an aggressive schedule. A new version should start rolling out around mid-year, including a recommendation system and uploading of user-generated content, YouTube-style.
“Phase two of Ondemand is all about interactivity,” Paris says. He plans to place users’ clips on the Ondemand website and perhaps even on the airwaves. “I can see a time when TV2, on a Friday night at 11.30, has the best of the user-generated content from Ondemand, pre-packaged into a TV show, and we start closing the loop.”
And if you or I decide we want to make a new series on creative business, Kiwi art or Mexican food, would Ondemand broadcast it? “Absolutely,” says Paris. “We’re really open about it. We can see TVNZ Ondemand being positioned as the home of video online in New Zealand. We would love to talk to Sky and TV3 about putting their content through Ondemand as well.”
Of course, TVNZ can’t afford not to invest in new platforms like Ondemand and leave the opportunity open to potential competitors in the living room like Apple and Microsoft, or run the risk that YouTube or Joost will start offering local content producers good money for their programmes. Brett Roberts, Microsoft’s director of innovation, says the company will look first at bigger markets than New Zealand. But he’s a fan of Ondemand and predicts an explosion of niche programming. “If you’ve got an absolute fascination with knitted teapot covers, there’s probably a thriving community out there of other people who think exactly the same. And at some stage someone will launch an internet TV programme, video blog, or whatever, for people who are interested in that. You’ll be able to find it and watch it on the device of your choice.
“If something is relevant to me, I’ll be happy to make a trade-off on quality for relevance … someone can serve me up a documentary in high-definition TV that looks fantastic on a 42-inch plasma television and it might be something I’m kind of interested in, but I watch my kids at times sitting in front of YouTube laughing their heads off at a two-inch-by-two-inch video they’ve played five times. And they’ll watch that instead of The Simpsons. And that says to me a lot around the viewing habits and how they’re changing.”
Gibson agrees. “Traditional outlets of media are just fragmenting,” he says. “It’s not that they won’t still be strong, but they will only be perhaps 60 or 70 percent of the market, where before they might have been 90 percent.
“You’ve got to find cunning ways to be working in that extra 20 percent on top of the traditional media. Which isn’t to say that traditional media are going to go away … but there’s going to be a lot of more stuff happening in other media, and people just have to be really, really quick to get it.”
The adoption curve, says Roberts, “could be quite spectacular … look at how long it took for the Internet to really gain traction—Internet access into people’s home. Blogging was something no one had heard of two years ago, and now everyone’s heard of it. I have the suspicion that five years down the track the same thing will happen to TV once the content is easy enough to produce.”
And a business model will emerge. It’s only a few years ago that publishers would scoff at blogs, claiming no-one would ever make money from their weblog. Now some blogging empires are pulling in millions. Says Roberts: “All you’ve got to do is stand at Harvey Norman on a Saturday morning and watch all the 40-inch plasmas walking out the door. People are happy to spend really good money on entertainment.” The challenge for screen producers is to be ready for the market; the challenge for amateurs is to just start making TV.
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Comments
Vincent Heeringa
Another outfit that is completely exploiting this new space is Trends TV. I just sat through one of their presentations yesterday. Man these guys are very smart in the architecture/construction space, doing work all over the world with niche TV and AV products. Check out their technology: http://trendsideas.com/ViewChannelCategories.aspx?region=1
Jason Kemp
The really interesting change is consumers as producers using tools like http://www.getdemocracy.com/ to not only manage channels but to broadcast and set them up as well.
Matt Cooney
Actually, I had expected the Democracy Player to be more interesting than it is. The project itself is intriguing, but I just didn't find that much compelling content; YouTube et al have far more user-generated content and Joost and others have more compelling viewers. There's some interesting stuff on www.vbs.tv, too.
The Democracy project will only get better, though, and I think the name change to Miro is on balance a good idea. Interesting times for telly!
Jason Kemp
Matt - I believe the democracy player (Miro the new name apparently means "to watch" in Spanish) is more of a player support infrastructure at this point.
It is an open source project that can handle content from multiple sources and I like the broadcast tools. For example setting up an Idealog channel video would be easy enough using their tools but that community doesn't have the reach that youtube does. But have you seen many (if any) smart perceptive comments on you tube about anything?
One other advantage is to be able to save multiple formats including youtube files and play them at will. Definitely worth watching and learning more about.
BTW I looked at TVNZ on demand and the almost constant ads are a bit hard to take and there is very little I want to see so far. (a tip: The RSS feeds are a much betetr way to access TVNZ on demand)
Eric Kearley
Hi really, sorry, but I have to point this out:
IPTV is NOT "Television over the Internet". IPTV stands for Internet Protocol Television, and uses Internet Protocol (a standard) to transmit television point to point often using copper wire. But most IPTV does not have anything to do with the internet.
TV via the internet (like Joost for instance) is instead usually referred to as Web-TV or internet-TV.
But, again, IPTV is something completely different.
Matt Cooney
Quite right. Thanks Eric!
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