 |
       |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
 |
|
The New Producers With TV audiences increasingly turning to the internet for their entertainment, broadcasters are leaning more and more on the skills of specialist digital agencies. These businesses in turn are rapidly evolving into the production companies of the future. In a special season starting today, C21 introduces the leading players. At the end of last year UK broadcaster Channel 4 said it would be taking the majority of its budget for educational TV programmes aimed at teenagers and channelling the spend into web projects instead. Baby steps to begin with – £4m (US$8m) from a total £6m pot – but an interesting development nonetheless and, if successful, a blueprint for a bigger shift in the way C4 commissions its overall output moving forward. Meanwhile, over at the BBC, a full-scale plunge into "360-degree multi-platform content creation" was at the heart of a restructure two years ago that led to the new commissioning architecture behind BBC Vision. While the corporation is still clearly getting to grips with this – lightly rapped on the knuckles in May for 'misallocating' £25m of funds meant for bbc.co.uk – the commitment demonstrates attempts at a fundamental rewiring of the collective BBC psyche. Fellow terrestrials ITV and Five may still be playing catch-up, but the message from the leading British broadcasters is clear: their futures will be less and less about linear programming. This means they will have to cast their nets wider both in terms of the kind of content they commission and the types of skills they require. The combination of these forces in turn means a shake-up in the supply chain broadcasters have traditionally relied on. While some production companies – Endemol, FremantleMedia and Maverick among them – have been dedicating resources to online for some time to prepare for this eventuality, even the most progressive independents still draw on expertise from specialists. Digital agencies, many of which sprung into being at the same time as the mass market internet itself, are now finding intensifying demand from the TV industry for creative, marketing and technical counsel as the nature of the entertainment people enjoy and the way they discover it transforms. Convergence doesn't just mean the evaporation of technological barriers between television and the internet, it also means the demarcation between those that currently lay claim to TV's creative capital and those thought of as service providers ultimately disappears. Many of the digital agencies that have till now been content to cater to their clients' requirements and be paid on that basis spy the opportunity to create and control IP of their own. An inflection point is coming at which businesses born out of the web will be competing with the linear traditionalists, which, in most cases, are still struggling to get to grips with it. Instead of pitching alongside one another they will potentially be going head to head for whatever pot of cash is up for grabs as commissioning budgets themselves morph into more sophisticated funding models. Meet the new producers, as the first in a special season of profiles on C21media.net launches tomorrow with AKQA Film. Jonathan Webdale 20 Aug 2008 © C21 Media 2008 
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
