Will TV Audiences Become The Biggest Distributors?
(Personal opinion only, not the views of any employers past or present!)
Erik says in that video, “Ultimately, the BBC believes that - this is pretty radical I think - is that the user will ultimately will become our number one distributor.”
However, this is in the context of how users recommend media to each other online at a much faster rate and to a wider social circle (even, publishing their recommendations) than in previous media eras.
It is current fashionable to talk about that happening on “social networking” websites which are limited to sending simple messages with links to actual distributors and perhaps redistributing certain kinds of small files, since these websites have central points of control - webservers - and thus bottlenecks on redistribution.
I’m also unaware of any BBC media which is redistributable by users today.
So I think what was intended was something more like “Ultimately, the BBC believes that the user will ultimately will become our number one director of programming” or whatever the people’s job titles are in BBC TV who do the same job people we call “editors” do in the newspaper industry: Selecting what’s worth watching today.
Which isn’t some far off radical idea; its something the iPlayer already achieves within a time limited window.
As we fall into the future, the iPlayer’s catch up window could start expanding back in time from 7 days to 14 to 52 weeks all the way back to 1922 (which is how far Erik says Auntie’s archive goes) and increase the ability of people to direct their own programming. In the earlier part of the presentation, this is something that Erik seems to imply could happen.
The Will TV Audiences Become The Biggest Distributors? by David Crossland, except the quotations and unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
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