Memorandum submitted by Broadband Content
Coalition
ABOUT THE
BROADBAND CONTENT
COALITION
The Broadband Content Coalition (BCC), in existence
since 2001, is an independent industry body made up of like minded
firms who all agree on one simple fact, that the take off of Broadband
in the UK is dependent upon content and the services that are
built from this content—the focus of Broadband investment
now needs to shift in that direction!
It is our aim to act in an advisory capacity
to both UK government and industry alike, utilising the experience
of our members to shine a light on the confused state of broadband
in the UK and how we think the winning formulas will be developed.
The BCC offers advice and guidance and consultancy services to
support emerging broadband companies and markets through its individual
member companies or consortia.
The coalition is managed jointly by Chris Hart
(chris.hart@martelit.co.uk) and Sandip Sarda (Sandip.Sarda@AssetHouse.com)
both innovators in Market Strategies, New Technologies and New
Media, and highly experienced in broadband, multimedia and content
from practical experiences in the UK and International markets
with PTTs, corporate, SME, residential, Government and Educational
organisations.
RECOMMENDATIONS
New Media, supported by broadband and the mass
take-up of the internet will potentially spawn new and undreamed
of applications and industries.
Past experience points to the uncertainties
of predicting future markets and technologies (eg "the paperless
office"—"electronic newspapers and books"—"3G")
and to the un-see able successes (eg "SMS", "mobile
phones", "P2P Services"). It is also clear that
the established practices and market flows supporting "traditional"
industries do not eventually protect them from the massive changes
offered by new technologies—(eg the demise of the canals;
the disappearance of secretaries; the disappearance of "snail
mail").
At this point in the evolution of markets and
technologies surrounding the adoption and exploitation of New
Media we believe that it is critical that governments should encourage
and nurture these emerging media industries. We believe that undue
regulation favouring the existing "media" industries
whose business models are anyway under threat and change (by usual
market forces) could stifle this evolution in the UK.
QUESTIONS
— The impact upon creative industries
of recent and future developments in digital convergence and media
technology, unauthorised reproduction and dissemination of creative
content, the regulatory environment.
— Where the balance should lie between
the rights of creators and the expectations of consumers.
1. GENERAL INDUSTRY
MOOD
1.0.1 The creative industries can only
flourish if there is a commercial proposition for the various
initiatives taking place across the globe. Huge amounts of investments
have gone into the core network infrastructure from the telcos
worldwide and more is on the way—the key is to make sure
that a framework is created to nurture the emerging media industries.
Various countries are looking to exploit their knowledge with
the super speed e-highways that connect the world now, creating
a global electronic market place. This also creates a challenge,
as countries/companies have to compete with lower cost of creation,
digitisation and production of content for the various sectors
of the market—eg Animation studios in India now produce
significant amount of cartoons from storyboards for US studios
etc. Most if not all of the initiatives are consumer driven and
if the creators (service providers) price is right and make it
easy, then the consumer is more likely to pay and abide by the
various copyright laws.
1.1.0 Advertising industry
1.1.1 Enthusiasm and excitement was evident
over the new technologies in the industry at a recent well attended
International Advertising Association (www.iaauk.com) and International
Advertising Bureau (www.iabuk.com) seminar and conference. There
are clear signs of advertising industry interest and take-up of
pod-casting and blogs as new tools for advertising. There is a
measurable move of a sizable percentage of ad spend to the internet
(see attached PDF and web link to IAB case studies) which is predicted
to continue. The increased availability and take-up of broadband
is at last offering to advertisers audiences of sufficient size
to justify investment in web campaigns. Apart from being smart
and sexy the internet web technologies offer inbuilt assessment
tools to enable better measurement of the effects advertising
spend—page hits; search criteria; redirections; no. of pages;
no. of visits etc. However the web provides a more personalised
interface to end users than traditional broadcast media (radio/TV),
and a more personalised and targeted view of available content—this
can lead to greater fractionalisation of market segmentation and
greater complexity (and hence cost) for advertising companies.
There is also the beginning of a move from "real"
to "virtual"—New usages of technology include
"online virtual wine tasting" (http://www.virtualwine.co.uk/),
using the internet, broadcast video and text talk for return interactivity,
to reach targeted but dispersed groups of potential customers
with a more personalised service—an up-market Tupperware
party approach or DK book distribution methodology.
We can expect many more new applications as
the innovators in the sector gain experience.
1.1.2 "Creative Advertising Industry
input...
It is my opinion that the converged, broadband
enabled future will have an enormous impact on the creative industries
well into the rest of this decade and beyond. At its most basic
level a major part of that impact will lie in the subtle balances
between the creatively led and technically led worlds. For example,
right now there is huge interest in mobile video with major investment
coming from 3G companies such as 3 Mobile and Vodafone, yet outside
of music video and adult content, everyday services such as soaps
or even specially shot mobisodes have failed to take off so far
because content creators are still struggling to get to grips
with delivering the types of content that actually works on that
medium.
It's the old could we/should we paradigm. Just
because we can deliver video to phones it doesn't necessarily
mean that we should. In a recent trial by the BBC to promote their
new series of the comedy Nighty Night a series of marketing clips
were released for mobile in order to promote the show. The uptake
rates were fairly successful for mobile but still only numbered
in the low thousands rather than the 10s of thousands which one
would hope for. A major reason for this is understanding that,
in order to be successful, promotional clips on mobile would have
to follow the same rules as viral email marketing activity. Normally
the most popular viral activity features the subversive, something
that poor old Auntie can't really be seen to be doing. So for
the creatives of the future, not only will they have to understand
how to make great content, but they will also have to have an
understanding of the attributes of the specific platforms that
content is going to be delivered to. Not only that but they will
also have to know how any particular target demographic uses that
platform.
This problem multiplies when you consider that
creatives need to understand all the available platforms that
a campaign is due to cover, without that you start to get a problem
trying to maintain a clear and consistent brand message throughout
your campaign.
Currently this problem is solved by brand owners
going to different types of agencies to fulfil their differing
needs, but in the converged future it will be extremely difficult
to do that effectively because nothing exists in isolation anymore.
For example, your outside print campaign may have a five digit
shortcode that once dialled sends a bookmark back to the user
to the related campaign WAP site. This WAP site can contain all
sorts of things such as copy, images, competitons and video. The
WAP site will need to be consistent with the PC internet site
and the video will need to look the same as the ads on TV. Without
consistency the brand will appear fractured and lose impact.
Behind all of this of course, brand owners will
want the usage measured in ever increasing levels of sophistication
which means the agency of the future will need to session manage
customers not just through the pages of a website, but through
multiple platforms as well. The only way to do this effectively
is to have the entire campaign delivered from a central server
infrastructure so having multiple agencies who all have different
ways of working may prove to be a problem.
But why bother with multiplatform campaigns?
Well unfortunately, the growth in new platforms means the increasing
segmentation of audience, with the major TV channels not just
losing market share to "multichannel" but they are also
losing share to the internet and increasingly gaming. Without
understanding of and representation on these platforms could mean
the difference between the success or failure not just of a particular
campaign, but also the long term prospects of a brand well into
the future.
So, what about the rights of content owners and
IP distribution? This is still wide open and it is my considered
opinion that there is no one answer to that problem. Certainly,
piracy will eat into the profits of major organisations well into
the future, but then again, piracy always has, it just wasn't
quite so measurable before. But not wanting to single a particular
group out, don't forget also that new technology has also benefited
the film and music industries for many years. Got the record?
Now buy the CD. Got the video? Now get the DVD? Media owners have
never been shy about asking consumers to adopt new technologies
when it suited them, so the fierce backlash from certain quarters
whilst understandable is also a little ironic.
However, it is also worth mentioning that with
the rise in piracy there are also new opportunities available.
Anyone interested in purchasing all your favourite albums again
but this time re-engineered for surround sound? Now available
with unique Hollywood Bowl acoustic reproduction? You can actually
feel like you there with the band... But seriously, with the rise
of product placement within TV and film at what point does is
actually become desirable for as many people as possible to see
a particular show rather than restrict it. Surely, the more eyes
on screen the better?
Does the problem then not become how many people
copied it, but rather accurately working out how many people actually
watched it so we can charge the product placement owners accordingly.
IF this becomes a model then the challenge to the creatives will
be how to weave in the placement without destroying the artistic
credibility of the show. In addition to this example, you also
have the Creative Commons licence which is used in the BBC's Creative
Archive project. This has been developed to allow creatives to
freely share their creative endeavours but maintain certain aspects
such as attribution, or the work can't be used for commercial
gain etc. Many countries have signed up to the Creative Commons
scheme and Google have recently launched a Creative Commons enabled
search to their portfolio.
In conclusion, I think the best way to think
about issues for creatives going forward is that different rules
will be applied to the various aspects of convergence, rights
ownership, distribution and so on. What rules are applied will
depend on the nature of the content and what you want to do with
it. If you are seeking to make money off other peoples work without
their permission, then that is clearly theft, but if you are merely
distributing other peoples work, then it will really depend on
what that work is and what the attitude is of the owner of that
work. Over time a number of different models will apply.
Ultimately, I think we can agree that we are
heading for very exciting times creative-wise in the years ahead
and with the rapid advances in technology we are now getting to
a stage where we can start to adopt a creative rather than technically
led approach to content creation. This will give rise to new hybrid
formats and I dare say new forms of entertainment never before
imagined. As to who owns it all, well as a creative, right now
I'm too busy having fun to care...
1.1.3 Advertising case studies
http://www.iabuk.net/en/1/casestudiesentertainmentandmedia.html
1.2.0 Education
1.2.1 Taking education and schools as another
example, from a user perspective the technology evolution has
offered the potential of complex, professional, highly interactive,
digitised multimedia content and tools, and the possibilities
of new processes and methods of the delivery of education in the
classroom and out of it. However this is often into a scenario
where the leading users (geeks!!) have been "spoiled"
by the global availability of small, simple, amateur implementations
available for free across the net—leading to unreal expectations
and poor cost vs value judgements on commercial products, while
the majority of the profession still struggles with the "chalk
and talk" culture and resists process change and the market
continues to rely on the promotional-push which the big players
are best placed and most suited for.
High interactivity, professional look and feel
and high multimedia-ness are essential to retain the attention,
engagement and enthusiasm of pupil users who are used to the mobile
phone, TV and games cultures.
The costs of developing products utilising this
flexibility and complexity are high, and as a result for the content
industry it has been, and continues to be, difficult to create
sustainable business cases for investment with a suitable ROI.
This impacts the smaller (SME) organisations with a critical dependence
on cash flow more than the giants (eg BBC, Grenada, Pearsons),
but they are not immune either. There is a real danger that if
a sustainable pull-market (where users demand and are experienced
purchasers) is not developed the innovation, flexibilities and
choice provided by the SMEs will disappear in favour of a few
large providers.
For the Information Society of Europe and as
a result of the continued investment in ICT in schools there is
an expectation that pupils will become more skilled in the capture,
manipulation, processing and presentation of information from
all sources and that these skills are desirable. There is evidence
that these skills develop as a pupil progresses across the curriculum,
moving from high multimedia, whole programmes, delivered on local
networks or across the internet, at the younger ages towards the
use of tools and free and roaming internet research at the higher
ages. Pupils also have become used to the availability of cost
free services across the net: content (music and videos) through
P2P networking; voice, video and text messaging etc; virtual visits;
access to content and the ability to manipulate and re-present
it.
As discussed in the Advertising input, whilst
the commercial exploitation for gain of licensed materials without
payment to the IPR owner is undoubtedly theft the current discussions
on protection methodologies (DRM) and their enforcement (inbuilt
in commercial monopoly products) appear mainly driven by the giants
of the music and video entertainments industries. These materials
are not normally used in education to any extent—excepting
the teaching of media studies or art etc regulation supporting
blanket implementations of these methodologies across all content
however, could have a harmful impact on education and other user
sectors if they stifle creativity and access to content, and equally
could be unaffordable to SME content creators.
Traditionally UK academia and education have
often been allowed access to (paper) content for free or lesser
charges—this relates of course to state sector owned materials,
eg Museum materials, British Library, archives etc, and having
accounted for the costs of managing access, should also apply
to digitised publicly owned content—BBC materials and national
Archives.
Will the new models of regulation and enforcement
stifle educational creativity or will there be special licence
terms for schools...?
Will schools be able to afford the costs of
implementing and managing licence regimes across their systems...?
What will be the implications on a school
where pupils infringe licence regulations at home, but then transport
the materials onto the school network...???
24 January 2006
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