TV’s Uber moment

By Henry Mason 24-09-2015

The sci-fi author William Gibson once said: “The future is already here – it just isn’t very evenly distributed.” One of the best ways to achieve future insight in one industry – such as television – is to identify what’s happening in other industries that isn’t happening in yours. Because the chances are the TV business will eventually be pulled towards those bits of the future that are already here – even if they don’t currently look relevant.

Uber is a great example. Just a couple of years ago, taking a taxi involved gesticulating from the pavement and making sure you had wads of bank notes. Then along came Uber. People quickly realised they could order a cab on their phone, that it would turn up within minutes, and that they didn’t even need cash. After such a seamless experience, people start to wonder why they can’t do that in other areas of their lives.

What does all this mean for traditional TV companies that want to recruit the best and brightest creatives? Well, first it means that they need to look beyond the TV industry to find out who’s competing with them for talent. Why do creative people go and work at Google or Airbnb, for example? The real pull is a desire to do things differently, a desire to change the world.

The fact is that in today’s information economy, creative people can take many more roles – and in many more industries – than they could even 10 years ago. The most valuable currency in the information economy is consumers’ attention – and that, in turn, means the ability to capture people’s attention is one of the skills the economy values most highly. Even though ‘storyteller’ isn’t (yet) a job title, people whose talent is in telling stories can do that not just in TV and films, but online, in games, in advertising and in apps.

In a nutshell: the BBC is competing for talent with Facebook. Visual geniuses might come up with the smartphone game Monument Valley, but could equally be working on Downton Abbey. The nature of work is changing, but actually a lot of the skills are fungible.

Happily for the TV industry, it is no stranger to two big trends in how the work actually gets done – the ‘gig economy’ and the ‘Hollywood model.’ Increasingly, even outside the creative industries, people don’t drive to work at the same business park for 10 or 15 years – they work on a succession of projects, or ‘gigs.’ And the Hollywood model is a supercharged version of that – projects that pull together teams of highly talented people, as happens on big-budget feature films. With information flowing ever faster, it’s increasingly possible for small, ad-hoc groups of people to have an outsized impact – and TV companies can take advantage of that.

Another big opportunity for the TV industry – not to mention viewers at home – is that the line between TV and the internet is blurring. Viewers today want a ‘second screen’ experience alongside their favourite shows, and mobile viewing unlocks possibilities for TV companies to appeal to audiences in much richer ways. Of course, there’s a tension in that, because TV remains a passive experience for the vast majority of viewers. However, the next wave of technologies – augmented reality and virtual reality – will offer another new set of opportunities.

In shaping their consumer propositions, TV firms will increasingly need to ask themselves: ‘What are we actually selling?’ Sometimes, it may still just be passive entertainment – stuff people switch on when they get home from work. But are there other jobs you could be doing? Lost was a communal experience that fans discussed endlessly. The X Factor is a participatory experience, while MasterChef sells an aspirational dream.

As TV takes on more flavours, and as more narratives and interactions spring up around it, it gains many more commercial possibilities.

I’d urge TV companies to also push themselves that one step further, and ask: ‘What business are we really in?’ Start from fundamental human needs – the desire for social status, the desire for self-improvement, the desire to be entertained, the power of connection. These things don’t change.

What changes is how businesses service those needs. Look at House of Cards on Netflix, for example. It’s a retread of a 25-year-old show, with a 50-something actor playing the lead. Incredibly traditional. What’s different is that Netflix delivers it on-demand, and you can watch the whole series all at once. Netflix delivers not only a compelling TV show, but also a good experience, a good business model, a good distribution channel. Great content isn’t enough anymore. What else have you got?

This is an extract from Tomorrow’s People: Making Cultures for Creativity, a new book from UKTV promoting British creativity. The book is available as a free download from iTunes, Google Play and UKTV.