Memorandum submitted by Arts Council England
1. INTRODUCTION
Arts Council England welcomes the opportunity
to contribute to the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee
inquiry into public service media content.
This submission outlines our policies relating
to distribution and participation, and our strategic interventions
and partnerships with broadcasters and new media organisations.
It also identifies some of the particular challenges and opportunities
for the arts sector raised by OFCOM's Public Service Broadcasting
(PSB) Review. For your reference, we have also included additional
supporting information in a specially commissioned essay, "From
arts broadcasting to arts media" by media consultant Anthony
Lilley (Appendix 1).
We have been following the PSB review with great
interest and support its conclusions relating to the `enduring'
benefits of public service content in the digital age. We believe
that artists and the wider arts sector can play a major role in
shaping this debate and working with broadcasters and new media
partners to deliver public service media content as we move into
the digital age.
New opportunities are emerging for the arts
through the impact of digitisation and new technologies. The processes
of distribution, creation, collaboration and co-production have
been transformed by technology, making it possible for more people
than ever to make and distribute arts work.
Technological developments in distribution offer
new and increased scope for consumers of arts and cultural material.
Live attendance and participation in the arts will always have
a special immediacy and value and can never be wholly replaced
by the electronic experience. However, research shows that people
want to engage with the arts in new ways, both as audiences and
participants. Digital technologies are revolutionising how we
learn about, experience, engage with and disseminate the arts.
They are also providing ever-increasing opportunities to create
art specifically envisioned for media environments themselves.
Government broadcasting and communications policy
and regulatory frameworks are of direct significance to the wider
arts sector and changes will undoubtedly affect broader provision,
opportunities and impact on audiences, communities and society.
It is vital that the environment for the arts
and arts media content is healthy and that individual creativity
and publicly funded arts are supported by a robust public service
media content framework. Such a framework could maximise wider
public investment in culture and the arts, and the potential public
benefits of media.
We would also wish to draw attention to terminology.
We refer to "the arts"—by which we mean music,
literature, dance, drama and the visual arts. Film is also a genre
within the wider arts but which we exclude from our submission
given that the UK Film Council has responsibility for this area
and is also making a submission to the inquiry.
This submission is structured in five parts:
— an overview of the Arts Council's
role, policies and work with broadcasters relating to the areas
of the Inquiry;
— the importance of PSB in promoting
public understanding, access and participation in arts and culture;
— the future of plurality and
PSB—including a review of broadcasters and the changing
media landscape;
— the Public Service Publisher
(PSP) and the arts; and
— a summary of recommendations.
2. OUR ROLE
Arts Council England is the national development
agency for the arts in England. Between 2005 and 2008 we are investing
£1.7 billion of public funds in the arts from Government
and the National Lottery.
Arts Council England has set out six areas of
our agenda for the arts: taking part in the arts, children and
young people, the creative economy, vibrant communities, internationalism
and celebrating diversity.
Arts Council England believes that broadcasting
and new technologies are critical to the promotion and development
of the arts in England, supporting our vision to place the arts
at the heart of national life. Partnerships with broadcasters
and new media organisations can greatly aid the delivery of the
Arts Council's new ambitions for the arts in the 21st century,
including making the most of opportunities to distribute arts
content as widely as possible and ensuring that as many people
as possible can participate actively in the arts including through
interactive media.
Our forthcoming distribution policy will cover
touring, broadcasting and digital distribution in order to make
the widest range of arts activities available to people across
the country.
We particularly want to see the potential of
digitisation and digital distribution technologies fully realised
and a step-change in the use of digital technology to bring the
work of our leading organisations to a wider public. We recognise
that digital distribution brings challenges. As a result, we are
engaged at government level and internationally in discussions
that are central to solving some of these, ranging from technology
developments, for example, and progress in media literacy to intellectual
property issues and the implications of the new Licensing Act.
It is also essential that a diverse range of
people engage with and participate in arts activity of all kinds,
and we want to ensure that people can engage with art in a wide
range of ways and discover and explore their own creativity.
We believe that creativity and the arts are
crucial not only to individual fulfilment and civic renewal but
to the UK's value added economy—the "creative economy"—and
to wider skills development. The creative industries account for
more than 8% of growth in the UK. [115]The
arts are therefore a key driver in a large and growing sector
of the economy. They help provide core skills development in schools
and higher education, especially for the creative industries.
Often the arts provide the career gateways—the first jobs—for
creative entrepreneurs and workers across the creative industries
including broadcasting and media.
We are increasingly seeking partnerships with
those working directly in the creative industries, including broadcast
and new media, to maximise the value of our investment and to
deliver our ambitions for the arts.
We support creative risk and experiment in individuals
and organisations, recognising the role of the subsidised sector
as a seedbed for talent that may later move into the commercial
sector. There is considerable movement of talent between the subsidised
arts sector and the more commercial end of the creative industries
such as West End theatre, visual art, music, publishing and broadcasting.
We already support innovation through project
funding and training across a variety of emerging platforms: the
Internet, wireless environments, interactive broadcast and formats
such as DVD, CD and digital photography, and we anticipate that
this aspect of our work will only increase in significance over
time.
Our work in education is key to new generations
of creative producers and audiences, and as a driver for the creative
industries. Over the last decade we have been developing and supporting
initiatives that explore the creative uses of digital and media
technologies within different learning contexts. We are committed
to continuing this work.
One example of activity where we have encouraged
artists and arts organisations to maximise the potential of new
technologies to develop new work and create greater access to
it is New Work Network, which uses the web as a locus of activity
for peer-to-peer knowledge development. Others, such as SCAN,
bring together partners from higher education, creative industries
and the museum sector in innovative collaborations.
The Arts Council and broadcasting
The Arts Council works with PSBs to increase
access to work of high quality and to stimulate creativity and
participation.
In order to make this possible, we support the
view of the DCMS and OFCOM that a healthy PSB ecology requires
a plurality of providers. Such a plurality is essential in helping
us to reach mass audiences and new markets, particularly among
those who have not previously engaged with the arts. We recognise
the need to engage with all broadcast providers—subsidised,
private sector and community—and work in partnership where
appropriate to deliver our shared ambitions.
We have developed strategic channel partnerships
with the BBC (Memorandum of Understanding 2005-08) and FIVE, and
are shortly to announce a major partnership with Channel 4 to
promote wider public participation and access to the arts. These
partnerships provide a strong bedrock for ideas and content development
and have resulted in major successes, such as Operatunity
and Ballet Hoo! with Channel 4, Fivearts cities
including the four part Singing Estate series with FIVE,
and Big Dance, Power of Art and the seven year Roots
initiative to promote diverse arts with the BBC.
We currently invest close to £1 million
each year in broadcasting through a flexible, responsive "creative
venture capital" fund. This provides significant financial
and development leverage with broadcasters and has already begun
to increase access by addressing areas of perceived under-representation,
for example increasing the profile of regional literature and
visual arts with FIVE, screen based dance and animation artforms
with Channel 4, and Black and minority ethnic artists with the
BBC.
We have sought to work with broadcasters on
a range of "beyond the broadcast" initiatives which
have harnessed the catalytic power of mass broadcasting in the
service of wider public participation objectives, creating pathways
to participation, particularly for people who may not have experienced
the arts.
These include our joint editorial Power of
Art interactive and online content with BBC which also included
opportunities for the public to engage with specially commissioned
new artists' work inspired by the series' artists. Last summer,
we co-produced 40 live dance events with BBC local radio which
became the largest simultaneous biggest dance class in the UK
linked to BBC network output and the wider arts festival Big Dance.
Further examples of how we are able to support
new action research, new formats and areas of arts programming
to stimulate public participation and/or increase public access
to arts work via broadcast media include:
— working with broadcasters to
provide linked support events, activities or information around
event television to stimulate public engagement;
— promoting production and distribution
of areas of the arts which we believe are currently under-served
and under-represented in broadcast media;
— sharing risk and investing in
innovative new formats or pilots which could have educational
and legacy benefits;
— stimulating new opportunities
for artists to work on television through artists' films and documentaries
and co-commissions;
— working with broadcasters with
high C2DE audiences in order to reach non- traditional arts audiences,
encouraging engagement with the publicly funded arts sector's
work or stimulating personal creativity;
— investing in new models of arts
media and broadcasting and new areas of broadcasting such as the
third "tier" of community media;
— commissioning research and evaluation
into impact beyond the broadcast; and
— forging strategic alliances
with other creative industries which are also looking at new models
of digital content co-production and distribution.
3. PUBLIC SERVICE
BROADCASTING AND
THE ARTS
Public service broadcasting brings substantial
economic, social and cultural benefits to the wider arts and cultural
sector.
The broadcasting sector contributes substantially
to the UK's creative economy and cultural talent base. The BBC
and Channel 4 in particular are significant investors in new talent,
artists' development initiatives, commissions and substantial
arts projects, often leading new developments and acting as catalysts
within the wider culture. The independent sector is also supported
by a market for arts programming including music, drama and arts
programmes, including documentaries about the arts.
Public service broadcasting also brings significant
cultural benefits to the public in drawing attention to the diversity
of arts practice and provision, maximising the impact of public
spending on the arts through increasing access to publicly funded
and high quality arts, and encouraging direct participation in
the live and digital arts.
Increasing access to the arts
In terms of access, reach and impact, mass audience
broadcasting is currently the key medium for arts media content
and for many, provides the only ways in which they choose or are
able to access the arts. The current PSBs—BBC, Channel 4,
ITV and FIVE—deliver a wide range of arts programming, with
high production values including performances and relays of music,
theatre, dance and spoken word and literature, together with programmes
about the arts to mass audiences, including those who may not
be traditional arts attenders. Programmes such as Picture of
Britain (approximately nine million audience) and Rolf
on Art (approximately five million) which take arts
as their subject and, critically, are scheduled on BBC1 in peak
time, can generate significant audiences reaching across the socio-economic
spectrum.
Programming which showcases the highest quality
arts can also drive up attendance and participation in the live
arts, with mass broadcasting being uniquely able to act as a "call
to action". The Tate, now developing its own production arm,
has worked with all the PSBs and has research which strongly links
broadcast programming to exhibition attendance. For example, 12%
of visitors to Turner Whistler Monet at Tate Britain in
2005 said that they had seen FIVE's "Tim Marlow on [...]"
broadcast programme. There was also a 10% rise in the online sales
two hours after the programme aired. ITV's South Bank Show was
credited with encouraging 16% of visitors to Tate Modern's 2004
Robert Frank Storylines, broadcast just prior to the show
opening.
PSBs can provide important entry points to new
worlds of arts learning and appreciation through their programmes,
support services such as 4learning and BBC Learning, and partnerships
with organisations such as the Open University. They can encourage
people to explore their own creativity through signposting them
to educational and recreational participatory arts opportunities
and increasingly in providing space for online debate and creativity.
There is an important and increasing role for
subscription, niche and digital channels such as Artsworld and
Performance, and channels which feature arts content as part of
a broader offer, such as the Community Channel and Channel U.
These can provide platforms for arts content, even though they
generally do not have the commissioning resources of terrestrial
PSB channels.
There is also an emerging market for arts media
content on DVD and via online distribution, together with the
expansion in the digitisation of art works and self-distribution/syndication
online.
For example, The London Philharmonia Orchestra's
Sound Exchange initiative, "a virtual presence of
the orchestra online" sponsored by BT's Rich Media, centres
upon an interactive website with a bank of 15,000 sound samples
recorded by the orchestra, free to download, for use in composing.
The site also features live video webcasts.
Encouraging participation in the arts
A growing element in arts media is the direct
stimulation of participation, involving audiences in the creation
of television arts programming or encouraging interactivity and
engagement in media arts work. Broadcasters have increasingly
invested in participatory formats such as Operatunity,
which show the process of learning, and in projects which link
event television broadcasting to educational/participatory opportunities
in learning, live or digital arts such as BBC's 2006 Big Dance
in partnership with the Arts Council.
Catalysing activity and leverage of additional
investment via public and private routes is increasingly possible
as broadcasters extend into arts development and production through
their investment in long term transformational projects such as
Channel 4's Ballet Hoo, Castleford, Margate Exodus and
the forthcoming Big Art Project. These are all complex
arts projects in their own right, drawing down funding from a
range of cultural partners in order to realise their vision and
involve individuals and communities in the creation of the art
works.
In addition, people no longer expect simply
to be passive consumers of art. In some circumstances many take
on the roles of commentators and creators in their own right.
In an age of increasing choice and personalisation across many
aspects of their lives, but especially in their media habits,
people, wherever they live, should be able to choose the kind
of arts activity that interests them and decide how they want
to engage with it.
Culture is changing from something that is simply
delivered to us to something that can be made or remade and remixed.
Art, particularly for the 16-24 generation, is not simply delivered
in its final form. Younger generations are increasingly seeing
creative works as building blocks out of which to create new culture,
not as an end in itself but as an organic form of art. The technology
now exists and is in widespread use to literally modify an original
work by remixing it or "mashing", or to use a range
of works to illustrate your personal identity—as in many
MySpace profiles—or to originate media yourself.
Participative online projects such as the Arts
Council backed Noise project or Channel 4's 4 Docs,
aim to stimulate and encourage direct participation and, in so
doing, blur the boundary between amateur and professional. Social
network sites such as www.flickr.com and www.youtube.com are showcasing
user generated content and creativity to an unprecedented degree.
Arts organisations are also exploring how digital
partnerships can bring new audiences and participants to their
work. The ICA has been collaborating with Sony PlayStation Portable
on the creation of a fortnightly strand of cultural programming,
available for free download at www.yourpsp.com. This innovative
partnership uses a portable interactive gaming platform to establish
greater audience participation.
We also believe that there is great potential
to further increase participation in the arts via community broadcasting—defined
both geographically and by interest groups. This new licensed
"tier" of community media is providing opportunities
for people to learn more about and become involved in the arts.
Last year we commissioned major research, in partnership with
the Community Media Association and the DCMS, into the nature
and impact of the arts on community radio, and this is due to
be delivered next month. This will inform our wider distribution
and participation policies.
4. THE FUTURE
OF PUBLIC
SERVICE ARTS
MEDIA CONTENT
Arts Council England supports Ofcom's rationale
for a continuing and evolving concept of public service broadcasting
in the digital age. We commend Ofcom for identifying potential
issues and strategies including the Public Service Publisher (PSP)
by which we can collectively preserve and maintain quality, originality
and plurality in public service content.
It is vital in our view that content which supports
citizenship and cultural objectives is promoted and supported
vigorously. The balance must be kept between this and a purely
commercial or consumer focused approach to content. In our view,
a purely commercial perspective will not be able to reflect or
stimulate the wider cultural and social benefits underpinning
public service media. In our view, this balance needs to be foremost
in the minds of PSBs, regulators and policy makers as we go forward.
The arts as a key area of public service broadcasting/media
content
The arts have, together with news, children's
content and religion, historically been one of the key PSB genres,
with particular broadcaster quota requirements. In recent years,
Ofcom has identified a downward trend for identified arts genre
programming in terms of hours of output, the scale of resources
committed and in scheduling out of peak time. It has referred
to a current "dilemma" for arts genre programming in
its summary of phase 1 consultation but also noting the popularity
of music and drama genres.
In fact, there are a number of current PSB genres
representing the wider arts—notably music, drama and arts.
In addition, increasing blurring or hybridisation within genres,
particularly between arts and entertainment, has precluded an
easy identification and monitoring of broadcast arts content.
As media technologies continue to diversify from the traditional
broadcast model and public service requirements imposed on some
commercial PSBs are likely to be reduced as we approach digital
switchover, a traditional genre based approach based on monitoring
hours will clearly become untenable.
Our interest in the arts as a key area of public
service content therefore extends beyond a narrow genre based
approach simply measured by hours or volume of output. We believe
that there continues to be a very strong case and necessity for
public funding of cultural media output, currently including but
not restricted to the genres drama, music and arts, as these provide
wider cultural, social and economic benefits, delivering innovative,
original arts content that benefit us all as citizens.
We do however recognise some potential threats
to the visibility of the arts within the wider PSB debate and
the new regulatory environment in which genres are replaced with
wider purposes and characteristics as described in Ofcom's third
part of its PSB digital review.
These new purposes reference the arts, particularly
within a learning context, including stimulating "our interest
in and knowledge of arts and other topics particularly those relevant
to our locality, through content that is accessible and can encourage
informal learning".
We also believe that the arts and arts media
content can and do address other purposes including to "reflect
and strengthen our cultural identity, particularly that based
on shared local identifies, through original programming at local
level, and on occasion bring audiences together for shared experiences"
and "to make us aware of different cultures and alternative
viewpoints, through programmes that reflect the lives of other
people and other communities".
Last year, Ofcom indicated that its immediate
focus would be on "the most valued programme genre news,"
together with new media forms of PSB programming (the PSP) and
Channel 4 Review. Ofcom has indicated that the next phase of the
PSB Review would "consider [...] the potential risks to arts
and children's programming on commercial public service channels"
and that these areas would "need to be part of the debate."
This does not suggest that they will inevitably be conducting
a review into other areas of content, comparable with news. There
is now, in the context of intense media coverage, a review of
children's content but at the present time, no indication that
the arts will be reviewed. Our research through the Taking Part
survey into general public attitudes and behaviours shows strong
evidence that the public values and supports the arts. We would
be concerned if arts genre programming, as part of a far broader
portfolio of arts content were not considered a vital area of
public service content in the digital age.
We believe that a rigorous review of arts programming
and content, comparable with news and children's content, needs
to be undertaken as soon as possible. This review of public service
arts media should be wide ranging, beyond the context of potential
commercial PSB broadcast deficit and examining new media interventions
and opportunities. This would also provide an important baseline
of information and analysis which could inform the remit of media
organizations with public service objectives and also provide
information to help the wider arts and cultural sector develop
partnerships.
Public service broadcasters and arts content
We propose that PSBs should clearly state their
strategy, objectives and work programmes in such a way as to ensure
that output conforms to public service objectives. We do not believe
that arts media is necessarily a non-commercial space, but we
are convinced that the market alone will not provide sufficient
quality, range and innovation. With this in mind, it is essential
that PSBs play their full role in arts provision and that their
contribution can be measured accordingly.
The BBC
The BBC has been and remains the essential cornerstone
of public service broadcasting and together with Arts Council
England, the largest public patron of the arts in England. We
do not however, believe that the future of public service content
should be the sole responsibility of the BBC, or that the arts
would be well served by a lack of creative competition.
There are still challenges and issues for the
BBC post licence fee settlement, particularly in relation to its
current and future presentation of and commitment to the arts.
Our response to the BBC's White Paper in November 2006 (Appendix
2) identified our wish to have a clearer articulation of its arts
and cultural strategy. We continue to urge the BBC to produce
this. We have suggested a strong scrutiny role by the BBC Trust
and clarity within individual service licenses to preserve arts
provision and aid the wider arts and cultural sector in partnership
development. We look forward to extending our own partnership
work with the BBC to maximise our shared interest and support
of the Cultural Olympiad in 2012 and support them in developing
wider arts partnerships.
Channel 4
A strong Channel 4 with a continued PSB arts
remit is critical to the wider culture and to achieving reach
and impact in the digital age; especially in key demographics
enabled by the Channel's reach. Channel 4 plays an invaluable
role in arts programming and in its bold support for original
and wide ranging output, supporting cultural diversity, artists
and innovation within the wider independent production sector.
Channel 4's support for and investment in new original content
created specifically for television has resulted in major broadcast
arts achievements which have introduced audiences to the arts:
such as its dance portfolio including DV8's Cost of Living, 4
Dance, its screen operas, Death of Klinghoffer, and
its commitment to innovative cutting edge arts such as Animate
and The Slot.
We are not, in advance of OFCOM's review of
Channel 4, able to assess its existing funding model but we are
aware of their argument for a projected shortfall which could
jeopardise their key role in the UK's pluralistic creative culture
and signal a retreat from the volume and range of high quality
output including the arts, drama and music. We will be supportive
of attempts to assess and address these issues, alongside any
realignment of Channel 4's funding model or remit—providing
that a strong commitment to the arts is built into any new approach.
FIVE and ITV
Both the commercial PSBs FIVE and ITV's excellent
arts programming contribute significantly to promoting wider public
awareness of the arts. With digital switchover, they will no longer
have enforced quotas (which currently include arts genre quotas)
and will be able to withdraw from such programming. It will be
impractical to continue to impose public service obligations on
the commercial broadcasters given this altered regulatory environment.
There are predictions that a more commercial
environment coupled with a lack of regulatory leverage will mean
that both FIVE and ITV inevitably withdraw or retreat substantially
from their widely praised arts programming. This programming currently
forms an important part of the totality of PSB arts coverage but
more importantly, these mass platform channels, both with a high
proportion of audiences in the C2DE demographic, are important
distribution outlets for the arts, promoting far wider public
access to the high quality publicly funded arts, encouraging informal
learning, and covering distinct audience and content areas to
the BBC and Channel 4.
Clearly, this has to be a real possibility,
but we believe that digital switchover and less regulation alone
may not yet be the death knell for commercial arts programming,
which has historically been part of the wider programming mix
and can attract advertisers. Commercial pressures already exist,
yet ITV has just announced a commitment to three more years of
The South Bank Show until 2009 (announced 16 January 2007),
placing arts within a rich and broad commercial programming offer.
Ofcom's PSB Review Phase 1 commended FIVE's `voluntary' increased
commitment to the arts demonstrated clearly by FIVE's striking
commitment to original production, which was not explicitly required
within Ofcom guidelines. This has resulted in FIVE's arts output
accounting for more than double the quota requirement in 2005-06.
Audience reach, public awareness and impact
will surely remain important objectives and there are already
examples of arts partnerships with the commercial broadcasters
achieving mutually beneficial aims. An example of this is our
successful three year partnership with FIVE, Fivearts cities,
which combines arts documentaries with a wide ranging "off
air" programme of arts activities and events, designed to
attract new audiences to the arts.
Arts Council England believes that the regulatory
leverage which has been a feature of the PSB landscape of quotas
could be replaced by new models of partnership working which could
still be of significant value to the public and wider arts sector
as well as to the broadcasters themselves.
At the same time, we recognise that the traditional
PSB model has to expand to include newer forms of arts production
and distribution. Public arts media content is no longer the sole
preserve of broadcasters, although broadcasters remain crucial
to the wider media ecology not least in that they provide mass
reach. In addition new, more equal, partnerships between broadcasters,
new media organisations and the arts sector will be important
in the future to maintain and strengthen the quality of PSB. This
is part of a trend in which we believe that the arts and cultural
sectors are becoming cultural media producers in their own right.
We look forward to seeing this role develop further and to playing
an active role in it.
Public service arts content on new media
Even within the current portfolio of PSB broadcasting,
there are areas of under-representation of England's wider arts
and culture. We believe that PSBs should bring the best of the
publicly funded arts to large audiences and use imaginative new
ways to engage new audiences in arts programming. But we also
believe that there are opportunities which could be addressed
more fully through stimulating and encouraging new media models
of creation and distribution. We also believe that support for
major broadcasting partnerships could add value and increase access
and public participation.
Lower production costs and the advent of broadband
sometimes offer arts programme makers and artists working in digital
media the opportunity to bypass traditional terrestrial broadcasters
completely. However, the sector lacks the funding necessary to
sustain what are currently interesting pilots and isolated or
small scale examples. Many arts organisations do not yet have
sufficient resources to develop and implement an effective new
media strategy. Due to their small scale and the cyclical nature
of their funding they are often unable to meet the costs of gaining
access to new delivery platforms to innovate and develop new services.
As a group they often do not naturally engage
with technology, partly as a result of skills gaps and partly
as a result of limited resources resulting in the prioritisation
of other areas of their work. In a recent audit of North West
Regional Arts Council regularly funded organisations, 82% identified
the creation of digital content as an ambition but 80% cited the
main barrier to IT/digital development was funding/cost.
We believe that there is a certainly a case
for the provision of public service material on new media. While
the broadcaster compact and business models are radically altering,
areas of new media production and distribution are offering significant
opportunities for the arts. The major modal shift in media markets
as a whole towards choice and control coupled with increased demand
for participation represents clear opportunities for the arts
which have traditionally often struggled in the mass market broadcast
arena.
The arts already play a dynamic role within
the new media landscape, engineering concepts and testing user
relationships. Artists and arts organisations are robust and critical
partners in industrial projects and research and development.
For example Blast Theory and the Mixed Reality Lab at Nottingham
University are key partners in the European IPREG project with
Sony. We welcome the opportunities that new media and the creative
industries offer for developing creativity, for developing artforms,
and for developing greater access for more people to arts and
culture.
Some larger cultural organisations are already
beginning to address these areas of broadcast `deficiency' and
the opportunities they provide to further their own work though
working in new media. This is often achieved by securing commercial
partnerships such as Watershed's partnership with Hewlett Packard,
Royal Opera House with Sony, Orchestras output with Universal
Music and Tate's agreement with BT.
We have commissioned a paper from media consultant
Anthony Lilley to support us and identify issues to consider affecting
consumption and creation of the arts, as we construct our Distribution
Policy later this year. Within this, he notes:
The landscape of "arts broadcasting"
has the potential to open up and to connect with other fields
and with communities themselves in a way which the technological
and ensuing social structures of broadcasting have prevented.
This could be a new age of potential for artists, producing organisations
and funders alike—but there are challenges. [116]
5. THE PUBLIC
SERVICE PUBLISHER
AND THE
ARTS
We welcome the public service publisher (PSP)
concept as advanced by Ofcom, and see the potential of such a
concept in maintaining a level and quality of public service content
in the digital age. We would hope that the PSP would have a strong
cultural and creative remit responsive to the dynamic arts ecology.
We look forward to Ofcom's forthcoming review
of the PSP and the findings of its Creative fora, charged in particular
with examining culture, storytelling, narrative and drama, among
other key areas. We also look forward to contributing to the process
by which more clarity on the concept, its proposed structure,
remit, and funding are developed.
In particular, we support the current work of
Ofcom in looking at the possible role of a body with its centre
of gravity in the new media (the PSP) and the ways in which it
might further public purposes. We expect and intend to play a
full role in those discussions and consider our own role as a
potential partner in any work which develops from them; as we
will continue to do with PSBs and other players in the landscape.
In principle, we support public funding to support
plurality and the PSP. We believe that the third party agencies
described in Ofcom's PSP review should include the arts and wider
cultural sector and that innovative new partnerships between broadcasters,
the arts and new media agencies could be encouraged through an
injection of creativity that the PSP potentially offers.
Current levels of public funding for the arts
sector could not support the ambitions of the PSP in maintaining
and improving the quality of PSB. However, Arts Council England
would welcome a role as broker, working with Ofcom and the PSP
to stimulate and develop a greater number of partnerships between
artists, arts organisations, broadcasters and new media players.
We believe that the PSP concept has great potential,
particularly in relation to supporting local arts organisations
and communities, extending regional provision, and stimulating
user generated content and community engagement. There are interesting
emerging pilots and projects such as Let's Go Global in
Trafford, Manchester, or Tennantspin in Liverpool, which
are situating the arts in local media arenas alongside local news,
and are proactive in situating the arts, artists and creativity
in the everyday. Both projects work from non city centre locations
and within the Arts Council's priority C2DE target communities.
In addition, a key factor in supporting Britain
as the world's creative hub is to bridge the communication and
R&D divide between the creative industries and the technology
sectors, enabling the creative sector to drive, develop and exploit
the potential of new technologies. A PSP could go some way to
addressing this.
We would wish to support the wider independent
production sector, particularly the regional production sector,
which is an important part of the creative economy. One way in
which we will do this is by helping to broker partnerships with
the arts sector to devise and produce new arts content for broadcast
or broadband distribution. We will be supporting a strategic pilot
into this area in 2007.
We believe that the arts sector can bring skills,
experience and strategic resources to help the PSP fulfil its
vision in the future. We can envisage exciting new co-funding
opportunities across the cultural and broadcasting sector. It
is our ambition that we and the wider arts sector are "system
ready" for the digital switchover and the wider spread of
digitization which will certainly take place between now and 2012,
and are able to partner in a dynamic and effective way. There
are commercial and voluntary models in new media for arts content,
which may be eligible for PSP engagement or a combination of Arts
Council funding levering PSP resources.
Even before a PSP-like organisation might emerge,
we see opportunities to build bridges between arts organisations,
promoters and producers, the commercial sector, national broadcasters,
and education and training providers to create a more integrated
and sustainable national framework for the arts and arts media.
Arts Council England would wish to encourage
networks, production companies, local and community media companies,
and arts organisations to work together, to exchange ideas with
the aim of stimulating a wider variety of creative content across
various platforms. We also recognise these new opportunities bring
new challenges in terms of the law and intellectual property rights.
We believe that Arts Council England has a role to play in developing
the opportunities and addressing these challenges.
6. SUMMARY OF
RECOMMENDATIONS
We believe that the digital age offers great
opportunities for the arts and for new partnerships to deliver
original high quality media arts content. We look forward to new
partnerships between PSBs, the arts and cultural sector, individual
artists and arts organisations.
Arts Council England wants the diversity and
the benefits of the arts to be fully represented and recognised
within public service broadcasting.
Within this paper we have outlined some of the
key issues for maintaining and developing arts media content.
Our summary of key points and main recommendations
to the Committee are as follows:
6.1 Maintaining quality and diversity of the
arts within PSB and new public service media content
We want the arts, traditionally a key element
of public service broadcasting, to continue to be recognised and
supported as a vital and diverse area of public service media
content. We believe that public funding and assessment of cultural
media output is important to maintain the wider cultural social
and economic benefits.
We would want to see Ofcom conduct a rigorous
and wide ranging inquiry into arts programming and content, comparable
to its current reviews of news and children's content. Such an
inquiry would provide baseline and important data to inform the
development of a future public service media content framework.
Arts Council England would welcome a partnership role in such
a review and would welcome the committee's support for this proposal.
.
6.2 Supporting principles of plurality
We fully support a strong and plural public
service broadcasting sector which has impact and reach. We would,
therefore, welcome the committee's support for the following:
— Arts Council England is a strong
supporter of the BBC and we want to see a confident post licence
fee settlement BBC that continues to value, invest and expand
its arts programming, particularly in relation to regional and
diverse arts.
— We would also want the BBC to
produce a detailed cultural strategy encompassing the arts as
part of its Creative Futures planning which will increase public
value and partnership potential.
— We would want a strong strategic
arts remit to be part of Channel 4's future role.
— We would like the excellent
arts programming by FIVE and ITV incorporated into their digital
future and that they will develop new partnerships to increase
mass audience access to the arts.
— We urge the establishment of
clear, measurable commitments to the arts by PSBs.
6.3 Taking the PSP forward
We believe that there is a certainly a case
for the provision of public service material on new media. We
would therefore want the committee to support the PSP concept
and suggest that this concept is further developed with particular
reference to our recommendations in section 4 of our response.
January 2007
Annex 1
INTRODUCTION
This essay is partly about technological change.
But it is mainly about the way in which the arts and their relationship
with media may evolve in response to technological change and
associated social developments over the next ten years or so.
In writing it, I have aimed to raise some of the questions which
arts and broadcasting institutions, both singly and together,
will face over the next decade. What the essay isn't is a prediction
of which technologies will win out in the end. Neither is it a
list of current gadgets and the futuristic claims of their disciples.
By looking that bit further ahead, I have sought to draw sharper
lines around the really big changes which are going on today,
and to point to some of the directions in which they may take
us. To claim deeper knowledge of anything more specific would
be both arrogant and naive; if almost fifteen years of being in
so-called new media have taught me anything, they've taught me
this. Overall, this essay will develop the theme that the landscape
of arts broadcasting has the potential to open up and to connect
with other fields and with communities themselves in a way which
the technological and ensuing social structures of broadcasting
have prevented. This could be a new age of potential for artists,
producing organisations and funders alike—but there are
challenges. We are seeing the beginnings of an evolution which
adds participatory media, self-publishing and niche distribution
to the ecology of broadcasting; potentially to very great effect.
It's easy to assume that changes in the media
landscape are entirely driven by technology. Of course, digitisation
is the key technological force which is triggering change, but,
I will argue, technology per se is not the only force acting on
the arts broadcasting landscape. Technological developments may
create catalytic moments in which change begins, but the absorption
of those changes into the culture generally occurs over longer
timescales and, often, with unforeseen and unanticipated consequences.
The connection which can occur between technological potential
and social change can be hugely powerful; even more so when change
spreads across intellectual, disciplinary, commercial and even
legal boundaries. To develop a fuller picture of the landscape,
we need to keep technological, social, commercial and legal elements
in view at all times.
The end of arts broadcasting?
There is a long-standing tradition in which
the proponents of new technologies prophesy the doom and decline
of established media. A cursory glance at, for instance, the commentary
surrounding the arrival of television as a mass market entity
in the 1950s would have given you every reason to believe that
no-one would ever go to the cinema again, much less that a film
like Titanic could take almost one thousand million pounds
at the box office in far off 1997.
Such doom-laden prophecies are usually fuelled
at least in part by a desire on the part of the people making
them to shape the future in the image of the new technology. This
tactic is essential if you need to convince people that they should
buy (literally) into that vision. Such simplistic models of the
transition between media technologies have little or no basis
in historical fact, however. This is because they take too narrow
and technical a point of view. While specific media delivery technologies
do die out, the medium itself survives in modified form. The truth
usually turns out to be more sophisticated than the predictions.
The newer technology most often exerts a pressure on the more
established which sharpens our understanding of the unique properties
of a medium. Cinema combines watching films on big screens, which
can be done in the home increasingly, with socialising with large
numbers of people to provide a unique experience which is not
the same as watching a film on TV, no matter how big your plasma
screen. This is the essence of the cinema experience as opposed
to the technology of film which underpins it.
Applying this thinking to the future of arts
broadcasting and the possibility of its death brings two questions
to the fore. Firstly, what are the unique characteristics of broadcasting
and how do they relate to the arts and secondly, how are roles
which have previously been played by broadcasting in the arts
likely to be affected by new technologies?
In order to tackle these questions, we need
to consider a couple of major technological trends which are likely
to affect the way in which people use media over the next decade.
In different ways, these trends are both aspects of one of the
most widely used terms in media today; convergence.
The first thing to consider is that there are
two major variants of convergence and that they're not the same.
The first, delivery convergence, is concerned with how
media gets to and from the user. At a basic level, the digitisation
of content delivery is well advanced. Switchover from analogue
television is becoming more of a public policy problem than a
technical one. The internet, of course, is digital by nature and
mobile phones made a relatively seamless switch to digital some
time ago. It is technically entirely possible to deliver any kind
of digital data over internet protocol (IP) based networks and
so, all over the world, telecommunications networks, including
BT with its 21st century network, are combining together previously
separate systems to take advantage of delivery convergence. That
said, there are still numerous media delivery systems which stand
apart; including digital television broadcasting and most mobile
phone networks. While the pressure towards delivery convergence
may be strong, the costs of switching can be huge—and the
benefits of doing so not necessarily obvious. Nonetheless, more
and more media will be delivered along converging networks as
the next decade progresses and, to bring in the next aspect of
convergence, much of it will be consumed via increasingly intelligent
devices.
Device convergence is the second type
of convergence. If you view the world from the point of view which
equates technology with progress, from a techno-utopian viewpoint
if you like, then the ultimate aim of device convergence is to
create a single device capable of solving all our media and communications
needs. While I do not doubt that this is technically possible
(although I'm personally not sure it's that necessary)—in
fact you could say it is here already in the form of a powerful,
broadband-connected PC—I'm not sure that artists and content
creators need worry too much about whether or not device convergence
will happen. Much more significant for them is the fact that the
modes and contexts of media consumption vary according to more
than technology. Whether you're in a group or alone, at home or
at work, travelling or stationary, relaxed or alert, creating
or consuming (and many more) have significant impacts on your
relationship to creative work. Technologies are giving us more
freedom to consume and create as media break free from single
devices so that it's possible, for instance, to watch a TV show
on a mobile phone, but it's the changing nature of social uses
of media which ultimately will have the last word.
The trends which are affecting the content market
as a result of technological and social change are, thus, very
deep-rooted. There is huge choice in media which is driving the
success of businesses which can help with the task of finding
what you want. Into this category fall search engines like Google,
electronic programme guides and even television channels and video
(or audio)-on-demand providers, including Apples iTunes Music
Store. Coupled with this trend is the important idea that the
number of contexts in which we potentially consume media is expanding
all the time as media become increasingly portable and pervasive;
from mobile phones to screens in taxi cabs.
But more profound still are the changes in the
kinds of media we increasingly seek to engage with. Media which
are based on control and contribution, such as computer games
and the web are very much in the ascendancy alongside more traditional
media. This is especially true when they build on the interests
of communities and understand that, increasingly, the people formerly
known as "the audience" also use media such as photos,
music and videos to communicate ideas and impressions about themselves
as well as simply to consume.
If we look at the notion of arts broadcasting
in this context, we see two directions of travel. Firstly, where
is traditional broadcasting headed? To understand this question,
we need to go back to a point made earlier and identify the unique
qualities of broadcasting in the context of the newer media. There
seem to be several aspects of scheduled broadcasting which will
sustain it in the future. Firstly, when it comes to transmitting
live events which can gather millions of people around the world
together, such as the World Cup or major news events, broadcasting
remains the best available technology and will do so for some
time to come, especially if HD television takes off. HD requires
so much data to be transferred that it will introduce a timelag
in many western countries into the ability of broadband networks
to deliver the content at least for a few more years. Put simply,
while the individual customer's connection may be adequate for
the bandwidth needed for HDTV, the effects on the backbone of
the internet of using current technologies to deliver such pictures
would be profound. Clearly, new technologies will come on stream
to solve this problem, but within the next decade they are unlikely
to reach the penetration of existing television networks.
A second key characteristic of scheduled television
is its ability to provide beats in the rhythm of society. Soap
operas provide a regularity to much social discourse, as do new
programme or film launches and the regular talking points provided
by long-running reality shows. It is the scheduled component of
this content which is of overriding importance—and this
could be delivered across other technologies such as the internet
or mobile phones—but, for the next 10 years, television
is likely to have a key role to play. Occasionally, these television
events on mainstream, mass-market television channels concern
or cover the arts; the Proms on the BBC is a strong example as
is coverage of music festivals and events such as the awarding
of the Turner Prize. But they are relatively few and, along with
much else, are likely to be further marginalised on commercial
television in future. One of the key components of successful
public service broadcasting in future is likely to be how well
it addresses these challenges and bridges the popular with the
"good"' and the "good" with the popular. This
will take place through the activities of dedicated TV channels
such as BBC 4 but it will also take advantage of new media.
There is plenty of room for optimism. One effect
of the falling cost of setting up a TV channel—and certainly
of the low cost of setting up internet distribution—has
been the burgeoning of smaller, so-called niche channels devoted
to particular types of content. This was seen first in television
with the rise of dedicated music channels such as MTV. Today we
have channels for cooking, shopping, cars, quizzes and, of course,
the arts. This trend is part of a wider picture of increased choice
in media which has already had a profound impact on the broadcasting
of the arts with the establishment of TV channels such as Artsworld.
There is, of course, potential for more of the same as it becomes
technically possible to deliver more channels over television
networks. However, the limiting factor is likely to be the ability
of any one channel to generate sufficient audience at any one
time to cover its costs. These costs are likely to remain significantly
higher in the sphere of broadcasting technology than they are
in newer media.
This idea of increased choice—also called
the "death of scarcity" by some—is a profound
component of the future of all broadcasting and, in particular,
arts broadcasting. We are moving from a world of scarcity to a
world of choice—and one of the effects we are already seeing
is the so-called "long tail" effect.
The "long tail" effect
Chris Anderson coined the idea of the long tail
in an article in Wired magazine, which he edits. [117]He's
since extended it into a very readable and important book. [118]The
idea has a long pedigree and it happens to be a combination of
counter-intuitive, significant and, more importantly, true observations.
Its effects are already being felt all around us.
So what is it all about? It goes something like
this. The main problem for most media folk in the pre-digital
world was finding audiences. Whether you ran a cinema, a DVD rental
store, or even a TV station, you carried only content which could
earn its keep. If you had the scale of ITV you could range from
soaps to documentaries to local news—but not all genres
earned their keep equally well in the short term. Along came multichannel
and if you'd got a low enough cost base you could earn your living
by putting out barely literate SMS chat channels masquerading
as gameshows.
But that's just the start of it. An audience
spread too thinly is no audience at all. But it all comes down
to how thinly you spread. If you're one in a million, then 768
people just like you are out there somewhere on the internet.
The internet's a big place.
We equate mass market with quality and demand,
when in fact it often just represents familiarity, savvy advertising
and broad, if somewhat shallow, appeal. [119]
Before digital, audiences watched more or less
what they were given. This world of scarcity produced a hits-driven
culture. The reason Morecambe and Wise, brilliant though
it was, got 28 million viewers at Christmas 1977 was that there
wasn't much else on. There are many reasons why hits are and will
remain part of our cultures and I reckon Eric and Ernie fit that
bill. But half the population thinking they were the only thing
they wanted to watch? Come on.
It turns out that most of us want more than
a diet of hits and it seems that the more we get the opportunity
to match content to our real tastes, the more we like it. This
is the essence of the long tail effect. The hits-driven culture
is a creature of scarcity; it is less important, although still
significant, in the digital, on-demand world we are now entering.
Businesses like iTunes, Amazon and Netflix,
to mention just a few, are showing that there's serious demand
for tracks, books or DVDs outside the mainstream and that there
is profit there. More than half of Amazon's book sales come from
outside its top 130,000 titles; that is from outside the range
stocked by the largest physical bookstore. Pretty much every music
track made available on Rhapsody is bought by someone every month.
They might only sell one of each but they make money on each one;
and they don't have to worry about the shelf space needed for
all this stuff or the rent for the shop. If you plot the effects
of this on a graph you get what's known as a power curve—lots
of sales at one end (the hits) and a very long line heading off
to the right hand side of the chart. This is the long tail. And
it's a very big deal. Its implications for TV could be really
huge.
Suddenly, although hits and broadcast brands
remain hugely influential in the landscape, there's more to it.
Three types of business thrive in the long tail
environment. Firstly, there are the long tail aggregators, outfits
like iTunes, which bring together the full range of content (hits
as well as niche stuff) to provide broad and deep services. If
you combine together enough failures (or past successes) you can
rapidly have a market which is bigger than that for the hits.
In many ways, they share characteristics with public service broadcasters
(PSBs) carrying a range of content to meet the needs of most people
some of the time.
Secondly there are niche suppliers and producers
who bring together communities of interest around their products
and either remove the need for someone else, such as a broadcaster,
to gather it all together or who also make their stuff available
to all kinds of new aggregators. This is beginning to happen as
independent television producers move towards self-distribution
of programmes, especially via services such as Google Video or
iTunes. It doesn't mark the end of the broadcaster, but it does
add to what we've been used to in the market.
Finally there are the new people who help you
find things. These guys are different to TV broadcasters in form,
but not all that different in function. Google is the obvious
example but there are many others. Essentially, search engines
and even blogs are providing the third business function of the
long tail, that of filtering, searching and finding. They are
trusted to do this. Many businesses which are native to the internet
exploit the long tail effect in one way or another. Ebay matches
buyers to sellers, Amazon provides unparalleled availability of
books and DVDs, iTunes does the same with music, and Craigslist
with classified ads. Sophisticated long tail businesses like www.last.fm
and others are combining the three facets of the long tail and
forging new relationships with audiences.
People are consuming more media but it's not
necessarily consumed in the same way as even five years ago and
new creative forms are evolving. But the biggest impact is felt
first in content distribution itself; in this case, broadcasting.
Broadcasting is a hits business. Today's hits
are often just as significant as they once were especially as
they span across media into newspapers, online and mobile but
now what they lack in range they make up for in depth of engagement.
Twenty eight million hours spent watching Eric and Ernie is nothing
compared to the total media exposure and usage time of some modern
media brands. The new environment offers opportunities to hit
content to build even more of a relationship with audiences by
deepening their experience of and engagement with the show. This
tendency towards hits, in the UK at least, is tempered by the
concept of public service broadcasting into providing content
which goes beyond short term, commercial fare.
The long tail could take this idea further.
It shows that there is demand for all kinds of stuff which would
have been marginalised in the daily schedules of broadcasters
trying to reach wide but shallow audiences. New aggregators are
beginning understand this and to show their colours as platforms
for and even funders of content. Advertisers have an insatiable
demand to pay for this in order to meet possible customers. And
that's before we consider subscription and pay per view business
models.
For broadcasters the battle is beginning. They
need to become trusted brands in this new environment and not
rest too much on their laurels. They will protect their current
broadcasting businesses against conflict from other channels for
as long as possible just like recording companies have done. They'll,
rightly, work hard to do this and Ofcom will need to look carefully
at the impact of their strategies not just on the narrow broadcasting
market but on the media landscape as a whole. This will test the
most converged of regulators. But this strategy won't save them;
they can't hold back the tide; better to surf on it and become
creatures of the new environment.
For producers and creators, there is huge opportunity
but the problems will be the same as ever. How to fund and make
wonderful work will still top the list. The good news is that
as the market matures, it's likely to get easier to find audiences.
It's great news for those with archives and back catalogues and
should turn out to be excellent for producers who can navigate
the more complex landscape of aggregators and funders. If they
can do this, with help from brands including broadcasters and
search engines, they'll find global audiences out there for all
kinds of stuff; it might hearten you to know that arts programmes
are a popular DVD rental from Netflix.
Towards arts media
If the long tail effect is showing us something
profound about the choices people make when they consume media,
we mustn't forget the other huge trend in media technologies and
the new ways in which they are being used—the so-called
democratisation of production. More and more, the technologies
of media production are becoming available to anyone to use, albeit
that the skills to produce great media content are more difficult
than the skills needed to wrangle the kit. At the furthest extreme
of this phenomenon is the private use of digital stills and video
cameras to record personal moments—remember the days not
so long ago when there was scepticism that anyone would want a
camera on a phone? Now watch any major sporting event and count
the people snapping away with their increasingly high quality
cameraphones. But the more interesting stuff is happening in the
burgeoning public sphere between the established media and private
activity.
One of the most profound effects of the internet
is that it has the potential to make private things public. Consider
the millions of photos which are shared on www.flickr.com, the
tens of millions of pages on social networking sites such as www.myspace.com
and www.bebo.com or the huge numbers who are participating in
online dating. The scale of the internet is able to transform
some forms of activity and, in some ways, empower people or groups.
The phenomenon of blogging is another example of this; somewhere
between the professional world of comment journalism and a diary,
there is now a form which is asking serious questions about the
boundaries between professional and amateur (assuming that you
think that boundary necessarily matters). My own project, FourDocs,
for Channel 4, sits at the nexus of television documentary and
this so-called `user-generated content'; something fascinating
is happening and the potential for the arts is huge.
We are entering a period where the ability to
make and publish media is becoming more widespread than ever—both
for individuals and organisations. At the same time, due in part
to the long tail effect as well as cheap distribution technologies,
the potential to find an audience is becoming greater than ever
whether this is on a global scale or by unearthing a community
of interest in your neighbourhood.
Making the most of the moment
The wider social trends which have been discussed
in this essay have hopefully provided some background detail.
This short section will now set out some more specific issues
relating to actual activity by arts organisations and their media
partners. There is still a strong case for the presentation of
the arts on mainstream broadcast channels and for continuing innovation
in production to make that possible (from Operatunity to
interactive coverage of The Proms). That kind of activity
is not, however, the primary preserve of this essay. Before moving
onto some major systemic issues facing the arts sector, like many
others, I'll concentrate here on three aspects of new media activity
which I believe present major opportunities in arts media:
— Beyond websites towards channels
and communities.
— Arts on demand and in the archives.
— Arts remixed and remade.
Beyond websites towards channels and communities
There are now few arts organisations which do
not have some presence on the web. These range from fully-fledged
sites with rich media and ecommerce capabilities to MySpace pages
for small or up-and-coming groups with many variations in between.
It goes without saying that in the online world, assuming that
someone can find your site in the first place, they're generally
there because they made a decision to click on a link or type
in an address. While that doesn't necessarily mean they'll stay
very long, at least it means they have some interest in what you
or your organisation is up to. It's a good start. However, many
arts websites, excepting those which aspire to the condition of
art themselves, are mainly marketing tools and/or aspects of the
organisation's educational remit. The web is the area in which
it is easy to see the potential of arts bodies to become much
more than this. By exploiting the potential of the web to deliver
rich media content, for instance, arts organisations can become
niche channels in their own right. The technology to do this is
increasingly widely available—especially as companies like
Google launch video services which make the technology available
effectively free of charge in some circumstances. There is no
real technical excuse not to become a `narrowcaster' if you have
the media material at your disposal.
However, the reality is that, quite often, many
arts bodies do not have this content at all—either because
they do not have the skills or budget to fund it, because they
cannot acquire the necessary rights or, more fundamentally, because
their work is not suitable to exploitation in this way.
While TV content about the arts (such
as TV documentaries) will almost certainly be amenable to exploitation
via online distribution, many art forms are not suitable for this
treatment. The rule of thumb for effective use of interactive
media is to exploit the aspects of the idea or content which fit
the medium well and, in the process, aim to deepen and extend
the relationship between the audience and the work or organisation
concerned. Overall, good interactive media can be employed to
develop and support a community of interest around the work at
least as much as to present the work itself. In the world of the
long tail, the potential of well-constructed rich media web channels
to become something comparable to a niche broadcaster is significant.
Furthermore, by using facilities such as search advertising (like
Google's Adsense or the comparable products from Yahoo and eBay),
it is actually possible to defray some of the cost of delivering
this content or, where the site becomes very popular, even to
make money!
Arts on demand and in the archives
One of the most common complaints directed at
broadcasters is that there's a treasure trove of programmes lying
unused in their archives. Put simply, in the age of broadcasting
scarcity, this was a natural and unavoidable state of affairs.
There was a limited number of channels and putting out shows on
them was expensive. As a result, audiences needed to be comparatively
large to make transmission economic. Broadcasting, almost by definition,
is more interested in the new, the current and the popular than
anything else. To some extent the concept of public service broadcasting
has helped to ameliorate this natural tendency of television,
over the years providing many surprising successes which bucked
the assumed trend of television towards the popular and away from
the "good".
The age of plenty and the coming of the long
tail are beginning to change this landscape very significantly—while
there will still be hits, we need to stop defining `non-hits'
as `misses' and realise that large latent demand exists for all
kinds of content. Arts organisations are very well placed to benefit
from making available as much material as possible from formal
television programming to recordings of performances to backstage
extras. There is likely to be surprisingly large demand for this
kind of content if we can overcome the measurement approach of
television in which overnight ratings are all that count. Video
on demand, which is what we're really talking about, is a retail
phenomenon—you count up how many units have been shifted
cumulatively over long periods not how many people tuned in to
watch the show at 9pm last night. This change in mindset is obvious
but it's actually surprisingly difficult to overcome the "barb
ratings"[120]
mentality of many who have grown up with a broadcasting mindset.
This form of mass media derives its meaning from bringing together
huge numbers of people to experience the same event or content
simultaneously—we should challenge the assumption that this
homogenisation of culture was either necessary or beneficial.
Thankfully, we are moving beyond it towards a more variegated
media landscape.
Once again, the technology is, in some ways,
the least difficult aspect of the equation. Arguably more difficult
than providing a platform for making available content is the
acquisition to the rights to do so in the first place (particularly
where older, archive content is concerned where contracts are
very likely to have been silent on such futuristic concepts as
the internet). Many of the rights models which pertain to the
mass media world are at least problematic and at worst antithetical
to the networked environment. I have written elsewhere about the
need to realign copyright practice so that it is fit for purpose
in the new environment. The need is urgent and profound—although
the legal and technical solutions are within our grasp should
we choose to reach for them. The mindset change needed to understand
the new landscape will take longer.
The second major challenge lies in ensuring
that content can be found among the mass of material which is
"out there"'. This goes beyond traditional marketing—although
a strong brand is a big advantage online as in the offline world.
Increasingly, search engines and the burgeoning area of "electronic
programme guides" are becoming the most powerful tools in
the quest to ensure that audiences can discover content. Most
search engines rely on metadata, descriptive tags, popularity
ratings such as cross-links and a variety of other techniques
to discover content. By using these tools effectively it is possible
to increase the likelihood that your content will rise to the
surface when someone comes looking—but paid ad words, working
hard to make key opinion formers such as bloggers aware of your
work and a good helping of patience will also be necessary.
Arts remixed and remade
There's also a really exciting extra dimension
to consider if you are in a position to make available media content
via new media networks. There is a burgeoning movement of making
available content in such a way as to make it possible for other
people to incorporate it into their own work by remixing or `mashing'
the original. This movement reflects back the activities of a
large and varied section of society—ranging from teachers
to VJs, schoolkids to genealogists—who have the skills to
manipulate media to use it in presentations, films and elsewhere
and, more importantly, the aptitude to do so. My project FourDocs
for Channel 4 inhabits this space to some extent by making available
rushes for filmmakers to use in the films they subsequently submit
to the site. The Creative Archive Licence Group—whose members
include BBC, British Film Institute, Channel 4, Open University
and others are beginning to release content in this way—BBC
recently won a BAFTA award for making rushes from the Planet
Earth series available to be recombined into a user-generated
trailer by visitors to their online site. This is the kind of
project which is scratching the surface of this kind of activity.
There will be many more.
There are copyright licences available from
organisations such as Creative Commons to facilitate this kind
of non-commercial use of content. These licences are finding many
applications including on the photo-sharing site www.flickr.com
and on the music site www.ccMixter.org. Many arts organisations
are considering the ways in which making content available in
this way could help them achieve their objectives and even move
into new areas. However, as always, there are practical issues
to consider. These include ensuring that there is full ownership
of the necessary rights in content to allow it to be made available
in this way. You might also want to consider the implications
for the moral rights of the author or contributors if you plan
to make available their work in such a way that it might be incorporated
in other works not in tune with the original author's intention.
Approaches to media content such as these are
a significant departure from the world of broadcasting. Done well,
they can deepen relationships with audiences into two way dialogues
and firmly rooted communities. As part of a balanced approach
to arts media, they are important new parts of the toolkit. But
they will continue to exist in the strategic context of broadcasting
for some time to come as well as in the online space. It is to
the strategic context I'll now turn.
A reality check
Three main practical questions arise from the
preceding discussion of the future nature and context of arts
media. Firstly, how might relationships change between arts organisations
and traditional funders and distributors such as broadcasters
and arts subsidy bodies? Secondly, and linked to the first question,
how will work be made and innovation funded in the future? Finally,
how will the skills and infrastructure needed for arts media develop?
These questions lie at the heart of practical planning and strategy
development.
Firstly, it's important to think clearly about
the relationships which already exist between distributors (such
as broadcasters) and arts organisations. There are clearly strong
relationships in some areas between the creation of live art and
some broadcasters, particularly those with more dominant public
service broadcasting obligations such as the BBC and Channel 4.
It is essential for the fulfilment of their remits that both organisations
maintain the level of current activity; particularly the BBC's
commitment to music through its orchestras and The Proms.
This paper is focused on the way in which relationships
between media organisations and the arts can be of the highest
possible mutual benefit in the new media landscape. I would contend
that as both the BBC and Channel 4 realign their strategies towards
more multimedia futures, as outlined in speeches by both Mark
Thompson, Director General of the BBC and Andy Duncan, Chief Executive
of Channel 4, they might well see benefits from addressing the
arts more fully and with greater commitment. This is not an appeal
for tokenism, but rather because such a strategy of contributing
content and marketing clout to artistic endeavour is likely to
have greater impact in the world of the long tail than it ever
did previously and thus help them achieve their remits. Their
strategy should go beyond `narrowcasting' arts content via audio-visual,
on-demand media online. It needs to be more than a broadband version
of BBC4—although there is likely to be an audience for archive
and new content of this kind. In addition, edgy, expressive work
designed for the networked environment and with a creative voice
which can cut through the noise is surprisingly rare. Where it
does exist, it is often taking place without traditional arts
funding—or on the edges of the arts funding sphere around
education projects or the outreach arms of major cultural institutions.
Much of this work is ambitious in scale and high in quality but
limited in reach, partly because it does not find the support
of aggregators—of whom PSBs can be one category—and
partly because it is too often captured by institutional politics
in one form or another. A greater commitment to innovation in
online content could well pay dividends—once again if measured
correctly in terms of their impact rather than just in brute numbers—for
both PSBs as they look to modernise their remits.
One major change in the overall landscape of
arts media could well arise as a result of evolving measures of
success. I've argued above that traditional broadcasting industry
measures of success—which mainly amount to viewing figures
and occasional focus groups—are not suited to the online
environment. Neither is the mindset which goes with them. The
short-termist view which is prevalent in TV is likely to fall
out of favour as it becomes increasingly necessary to measure
usage figures over longer periods than ever before. Concepts such
as `impact' will be needed to address the question of whether
a work has been successful.
Funding bodies that understand this approach
will find it essential to develop long term partnerships with
broadcasters and, for that matter, other aggregators such as portal
providers and even search engines to help deliver content, financial
support and, perhaps most importantly, access to audiences for
artists and arts organisations. It will become impossible—and
unnecessary—for broadcasters to commission all the work
which they aggregate and link. They are increasingly likely to
seek partnerships to ensure that they get preferential or exclusive
early access to work which is funded by others to supplement their
self-commissioning. In such circumstances, they may well not fund
the costs of shooting a performance or making a documentary about
an artist, but will be willing to show it or offer it for viewing.
This is already the basic model for purely online aggregators
such as Google and Yahoo. This model is likely to become more
prevalent over time. This trend could leave a funding gap for
public content in general and certainly for the arts. It is unlikely
that traditional arts funding as it is currently configured would
be able to go near matching this shortfall—although innovative
concepts such as OFCOM's public service publisher (PSP), could
be the beginnings of a response to such issues. This approach
could well supplement the moves currently being made by our major
PSBs to realign themselves, although an organisation built from
the ground up for this new networked environment is likely to
approach issues such as rights, to pick just one, from a different
perspective to more mature PSBs.
One thing is for sure, arts organisations waiting
for old-fashioned commissioning funding from the big online players
will have a long wait. It will be some time, if at all, before
this starts to happen. In the meantime, while distribution opportunities
abound—including via digital TV channels dedicated to the
arts—there will need to be strategic changes at the PSBs
and or in the funding system at quite a large scale (say around
£50-100 million per annum) if the opportunities presented
by new media for the arts are to be met by a flowering of new
work and new approaches to existing work.
Finally, it is worth a short note on technology
infrastructure. Put bluntly, technology is no longer the issue
and, in my view, shouldn't detain arts managers for very long.
Early projects in the field of arts online, which sought to create
portals and spent considerable sums of money on technology, were
products of their time. Today's landscape is very different to
that of even five years ago. Technology is increasingly available
via partnering, intelligent use of existing tools such as blogging,
photo-sharing, online video hosting and others, to meet the needs
of many arts organisations. There is potential that strategic
arts organisations could develop some of the necessary partnerships
at a sector-wide level before making these available to organisations
in their funding chain. This could be an efficient and timely
way to meet the costs and technical challenges of getting many
arts organisations into the arts media age—but it will require
leadership and vision at the central level if it is to be achieved.
The main barriers, increasingly, concern the
availability or otherwise of skills to manage and maintain services;
the business skills needed by all managers, including arts managers,
when it comes to making decisions concerning online strategy,
including costs and budgeting; and finally, board development
programmes which help ensure that arts media and the development
of meaningful online strategies is not relegated to "nice
to have" status. The business world has to some extent moved
beyond this viewpoint—but, from my experience, it is still
more common in the public sector and arts worlds than in many
others. This is usually the fault of those at the top—in
all sectors, not just the arts—failing to have direct experience,
either professionally or as users, of the new media technologies
which are increasingly common among audiences.
Strategic bodies such as the Film Council or
Arts Council are in a unique position to look at these systemic
issues which affect the sector and address them. These may fall
into a number of categories, but foremost among them are:
— Early identification of upcoming
issues.
— Identification of areas of friction—such
as information asymmetries, capital investment needs or policy
barriers.
— Provision of schemes or services
to mitigate the above.
— Strategic investment in public
service/arts content to remedy deficiencies in the market and/or
meet public purposes.
These roles will become increasingly significant
over the coming decade as networked media becomes truly mainstream.
There are urgent issues around funding priorities, rights management
and skills development which need to be tackled today. Strategic
activity is required to meet these issues head on.
What is the role of arts funding?
It is essential that existing arts bodies such
as the Arts Council are able to respond to the changing landscape
and to make the most of opportunities by investing in and supporting
strategically significant projects. Some examples might include:
— the digitisation of archives;
— the installation of digital
media recording and editing infrastructure at performance venues;
— assistance with the establishment
of relationships with talent unions such as the Musicians Union
and Equity;
— the establishment of relationships
with aggregators and technology providers to allow arts organisations
themselves to best use their resources;
— the provision of up to date
information about arts media online and what others are doing—the
creation of a community of practice; and
— increased support for artists
who are native to the online space.
Many of these activities are already ongoing.
However, it is unlikely that investment is being made at a level
sufficient to meet likely future demand or to solve the skills
challenges which lie ahead.
CONCLUSION
The rise of arts media and the increasing maturity
of the online medium itself present a major opportunity to extend
the reach and impact of the arts as never before. Arts online,
like all new media, should be more than ecommerce or ticketing
and information websites. These are the basic requirements of
an arts organisation's new media presence. As the online space
becomes increasingly video-oriented it is beginning to approach
a new plateau of technological maturity. But the changes we are
seeing are not primarily about the technology. They're about the
society we live in. At root, they're about talent, time and trust.
The talent to make and share work, the time to do it properly
and trust in the ideas we share and in the organisations and individuals
who gather it together, find it or signpost it for us. In that
the future is reassuringly like the past; just a little different.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Publications
Anderson, Chris, "The Long Tail", in Wired,
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Anderson, Chris, The Long Tail: Why the Future
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Websites
www.amazon.co.uk
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www.flickr.com
www.last.fm
www.myspace.com
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Lilley, Anthony, "From arts broadcasting towards arts media",
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Anderson, Chris, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business
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