[by Mike Butcher] Ashley Highfield, head of BBC New Media, spoke to the UK’s Association of Online Publishers Conference in London today, telling them that in the future, major broadcasters like the BBC would actually produce less content not more, and act as aggregators and trusted guides to user generated content like blogs.
After noting that, in the famous phrase, the “future not what it used to be”, referenced how the pace of change was massively quickening in new media.
“We are on the edge of a broadcast revolution. Over the last nine months we have seen exponential growth. The BBC now puts out 10GB a second of audio/visual streaming content – equivalent to broadcasting 2,500 TV channels simultaneously. The daily audience online for the 6pm TV news broadcast is now the same.”
Highfield said the impact of a number of new technologies was being grossly underrated by the media industry, among these Personal Video Recorder like Sky+ and Tivo, and Internet broadcast like Wi-Max.
“Another issue is the rise of user generated content. The trend is I see is that this it will become a case of tuning into BBC1, BBC2, along with the My Home Video and My Wedding channels.The implications are profound.”
“Content is not king. I see a triumverate of content, quality and functionality. The BBC is based on the first two. But Google and eBay are based on functionality.”
He saw the biggest trends as being high speed broadband. “8MB will be the standard by 2008 – fine for high quality on demand video.”
The second issue is rights and technology over the Web. The BBC has had 48m requests for AV content. There have been 1.4m downloads since its recent Beethoven programmes: “This is driving the clearance of rights.”
Other key quotes included:
“If we as media owners don’t want to be disintermediated we must be experts in functionality context, navigation and search.
“The BBC has 600,000 hours of archive. Archivists will be the sexy new job.”
“User generated content [like message boards] on the BBC sites count for 1-2% of consumption. I believe it will soon account for 10-20% of everything we host.”
“Broadcasters will put more money into fewer, bigger, better programmes. Once the archive is on demand, it will take up 20% of consumption. This implies we’ll spend far more on archive than on production.”
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