One way to deal with a problem…
Yesterday, we had something of a surreal meeting with a major executive from a major media company, both of which shall remain nameless, at least for now.
We were seeking a partnership for NYVS – an investment and a place where our members could air their material to a larger world.
The executive agreed that indeed, it was unquestionable that the power to produce content was inevitably going to move from major media companies to the general public – much as the power to write books had moved to the general public with the invention of the printing press in 1452.
Today, instead of a printing press we have an iPhone with an HD camera, or Final Cut Pro software.
The executive said that he totally believed that this was the future – that people in general (as opposed to networks or production companies) could produce more interesting shows cheaper, faster and better. That this was inevitably going to happen.
Good, I thought, we are there.
Not quite.
The executive then said that he would have great difficulty getting ‘buy in’ from the major media company.
Why?
“Because no one is going to fund the agent of their own destruction.”
“What do you mean?”
“Any producer who works for a major media company is going to look at this and see that someone else can effectively do their job for a lot less money. It makes them redundant. Therefore, they are going to do everything they can to stop this from happening.”
“But you agree it is going to happen.”
“Oh, I totally agree that this is the future. But I can’t sell it to them.”
In the winter of 1600, a 60-year old miller named Domenico Scandella was burned to death in the Campo di Fiori in Rome. His crime? He was the first person in his small village of Pordenone to learn to read. And he read with a vengence. He also began to go about the town, talking to his friends and neighbors about what he had read. This, to the Church, was heresy, and had to be stamped out.
Scandella was brought to trial and found guilty. The Vatican kept meticuous records of the case and in 1970, Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg published it as The Cheese and the Worms .
This is a true story.
At his trial, Scandella turned to the public and gave the real reason for his pending doom:Â “They don’t want you to know what they know”.
Truer words were hardly spoken – then, or now.
Today, we are a bit more sophisticated.
We don’t burn those who become video literate at the stake in public, though there are those, I am sure, who would like to do so.
Instead, we simply dismiss them.
‘Amateurs’.
But the change that is coming is inevitable. As any network executive would agree.
Too bad they don’t have the courage of their convictions – but thankfully, they don’t have a match nearby either.
8 Comments
Stan Engelen March 19, 2011
well, the way i see it, it is about finding the right balance, working with non-professional filmmakers or UGC-video footage should have a clear goal; cnn’s ireporters increase cnn’s chances of being on the spot while the news happens, the global reporters of Metropolis (that range from non-professional to professional video journalists) are a way for us to find remarkable stories in any place on earth that we could not ever have found through research from The Netherlands.
the second, and perhaps even more important step is to find the right form to make the (often less professionally produced stories) attractive for a larger audience, which means: adding your own creativity and skills. To my mind, it is this last step that is often underestimated. But only when these two ‘layers of production’ come together interesting new forms can be found, I would say even on American TV 😉
and sorry for promoting our project, i don’t intend to do that,but as illustration to my comment- have a look at one of our episodes to get an idea of how we dealt with this, we work with local video reporters that find stories on the same global topics, it took 2 years to find the right form but we tripled our market share since the start and are promoted to prime time on thursdays since last season,
http://www.metropolistv.nl/en/watch/tv-broadcasts/watch-episode-heartbreak
Nino March 19, 2011
Comparing US broadcasting with the BBC is pointless. The BBC is not dependent on rating and the subsequent advertising dollars.
True, if the producer’s career is not dependent on his last success (or failure) then he could take chances. But here in the US with each program being rated hours after it was broadcasted the situation is a bit different. One bad rating and it’s the street for the decision maker.
We are not going to change the system, we have to live with it and make the best of it.
The fact remains that you can’t blame executive for not wanting to take chances with something that in the past has repeatedly failed and has no proven success, nobody is that stupid.
Start creating programs that viewers will want to watch and success is guaranteed.
Nino March 19, 2011
The fact remains that this is a copycat business. Executives will copy successes and run away from failures. So far every single attempt to create public or cheaply generated (non professional) contents programming has failed to generate any revenue, meaning of course that the public is totally disinterested on what you guys have been doing. And when there are no viewers there are no advertisers and therefore no revenue.
See Current TV as example.
Web generated content hasn’t generated any revenue either unless it’s directly associated to traditional broadcasting. In fact look at Alexa and you’ll see that the greatest web traffic is on those sites belonged to broadcaster and integrated to standard TV.
The bottom line is that this is a business with stockholders that want to see return on investment, and those who have the final say in how much revenue (if any) will be generated is the viewing public.
So don’t blame the executives, blame yourself for not being capable of creating programs that would attract the public interest.
If there was money to be made, trust me, you wouldn’t have to sale he concept, they would be chasing you. But after so many years of fantasies and concepts that never materialized, the bottom line is that nobody has shown the ability to create work that would generate consistent revenue.
Michael Rosenblum March 19, 2011
Ironically, some of the best programming on TV (and a great deal of which is consistently copied by US networks) are produced first by The BBC. From The Office to Dancing with The Stars to Britain’s Got Talent (the model for American Idol), it is the BBC that consistently produces the model that Americans then copy – and generally not as well. What makes The BBC so good? A great deal of it has to do with the fact that BBC Executives are not driven by the needs of the stockholders to show a profit. There are no stockholder and there are no advertisers either, so the desires of the audience are in fact secondary to the ability of the commissioning editors to take the kinds of risks that US networks just won’t take. There are a lot of advantages to having a well funded public broadcaster, something the US is sorely lacking in. I note that VPRO, the Dutch public broadcaster is now funding Metropolis, an experimental series based entirely on ‘user generated content’. More on this tomorrow.
Stan Engelen March 19, 2011
yes convincing the executives is the most difficult part, you need to have people with an innovative mindset, and they are still hard to find in tv industry. In the case of metropolis the chief editor of VPRO was one of the people that came up with the idea, that helps a lot 😉
and in addition; i think that ‘the public’ and ‘amateurs’ are capable of producing interesting TV content, but one way or another that content needs to be translated into the demands of mass media. In our case – the program got better with every new series, as we discovered new narrative ways to present the stories to the public, we add quite a lot of commentary for example, and now mirror the local stories and observations with stories from The Netherlands, creating nice contrasts between our own and other cultures, which makes it a ‘foreign affairs program’ that is actually about ourselves.
Ian McNulty March 19, 2011
You were lucky! At least your major executive accepted that the general public is capable of producing content.
Way back in 2003 we had a meeting with a couple of major executives at a major regional screen development agency in the UK which receives millions of taxpayer’s money every year to ‘engage audiences and communities’ and develop a regional ‘screen culture’.
We were seeking a minimal amount of funding to develop a variation of the Pop Idol / Britain’s Got Talent reality-show format – with members of the general public competing to make TV programmes rather than singing Karaoke, feeding chickens, cooking dinner, getting naked or whatever. (see http://mcnultymedia.co.uk/i2m2/projects/tellystars/programmes.php)
Ten minutes into our presentation it became obvious they weren’t liking what they were hearing at all.
I stopped the presentation.
“I’m getting the feeling you don’t think the general public are capable of producing TV content,” I said.
“I don’t think it”, I’m sure of it,” the CEO replied.
Not much you can say to that!
I thanked him for his time, packed up the presentation and have had nothing to do with the TV Biz since.
invitedmedia March 17, 2011
you’re lucky the guy was honest with you.
we’ve all seen positions taken in things like you are doing only to hog-tie you and crew with fine print in exchange for $$$$.
all ultimately built-to-fail, but over the longer term.
if it cost “them” 100 million to keep you from killing them off for a few years, then that’s a good investment as far as “they” are concerned.
seen it in action.
Stan Engelen March 17, 2011
I fully recognize your frustration there, this is one of the reasons that it’s so hard to change the system, even from ‘within’. may I point you to a project that we started 3 years ago in Holland, as it is a concept that combines a few elements in order to ‘infiltrate’ the broadcasting system, with new forms of video reporting. it’s called Metropolis and combines the benefits of camjo-style video journalism (great stories) and mass media (money!); the stories are produced by young local video journalists from any place in the world, edited into ‘mass media’ tv shows on prime time and published individually online on our website: http://www.metropolistv.nl/en