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The future of TV

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8 July 07

My job involves a fair bit of crystal ball gazing.

When planning channels you've got to do a fair bit of [informed] speculation about what's going to happen in the future, so that your propositions are sustainable and will deliver value for many years to come. My jobs have always been about strategising and executing change, so giving the impression of being able to confidently predict what the future will look like has always been important.

This used to be quite easy. Back in the new media and dot-com boom days in the nineties it was very, very easy to become an "expert". Everyone was.  Then, around 2000, a friend of mine took me out for lunch and asked, "Have you noticed how talking well just isn't enough these days, and how you now also have to actually deliver on the predictions?"  And that was the end of an era.  But I digress.

The truth is this, I believe:  Broadcasting is an industry in what is usually called "flux" through what academics call "the emergence of disruptive technology" facing "uncertain futures". That means no one knows exactly what is going to happen. Those trying to be exactly right will almost always turn out to be exactly wrong. But, you can still be broadly right, and make generally OK predictions about the future.

There are a lot of places out there where interesting predictions are made and concepts are being tried out.  Here are a few that I have used recently:

• http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/entertainment/2006/future_of_tv/default.stm - This section of the unrivalled, fantastically rich BBC website contains basically everything about the future of TV. One could spend days just on this site.
• http://newsatseven.com/ - This one shows what the future of TV-production might be like... virtual news presenters who know what you want to see and gathers it for you... all produced by a computer.  Even if you dont believe TV will be edited and presented by computer, you have to believe that a lot of telly will be made by ordinary people of course this has already happened through YouTube, etc.  But there are other sites that do it in different ways.
• http://current.tv/ - I like this one because it's a lot more interactive and makes the jump from new style TV back to old style TV.  Try it!

I could go on, but this has got to be enough for now?

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