New Media Age magazine, which covers all things, um, new media, has a great interview with Jane Lighting, chief executive of Five, which covers a lot of ground.
Five’s been putting its toes very lightly into the video on-demand market, pretty much limiting its sales to CSI and Grey’s Anatomy. Episodes were sold on a transactional model — i.e., you pay for access for a limited period. By keeping their library quite small, it’s made it easier for them to track trends in buying, so they can see how well on-air promotions feed into sales, as well as seeing whether weekends or even the weather affect sales. Lighting sees that as being an easier transition from their existing broadcast model, which of course is ad-funded as well.
One refreshing thing to hear is that Five will be expanding its on-demand portfolio slowly, ensuring that navigation for users is kept as easy as possible. Says Lighting:
Some people are going for offering everything but actually it’s a bit difficult to make your way round it.
4oD and BBC iPlayer, take note…
The other big topic of conversation is of course viewer trust. Five has been in the frame over premium rate phone quizzes, with scandals involving Brainteaser and Quiz Call.
As an industry we’ve had a culture that the duty to the viewer was to entertain. The duty was ‘The show must go on.’ If you were watching a cabaret and a dancer’s shoe came off, she’d keep dancing. This is the culture that exists in the theatre. I think it transferred into television and it stopped at that point. People felt their biggest obligation to the viewer was to entertain at all costs. Almost all costs. And clearly, that is not the appropriate way.
But Lighting makes an important point: Ofcom goes after the broadcaster, not the programme producer, something that Richard Ayre’s report pushes even further. But the broadcast industry as a whole has been pushing more and more back onto the independent producers, so the industry is moving in one direction while the regulators go in the other:
…in fact, the report that’s just come out from Richard Eyre is taking that a stage further and is saying that even the telephony service suppliers should not be in the line of fire but the broadcaster should also be responsible for that.
Now historically, some of the independents have the direct relationship with the telephony service providers. In fact, that’s one of the ways they would make additional money themselves because they would have a deal with them. So the relationship was not between the broadcaster and those companies at all.
So we’re going to have to about-turn quite a lot of structure of our supply chain. And I personally think that we’ve got to make sure that the risk or award balance is more appropriate, that if the upside in the revenues and the rights are sitting somewhere, it’s kind of tough if all the obligations, the fines and the responsibilities sits somewhere else.
