With wireless communication, your palm pilot would tell you about tonight's programming, based on what your interests are. And you'll be able to take the palm pilot home, stick it on your coffee table and it will change channels for you. If there's a conflict it will ask if you'd like to record a different channel. And we're looking for people to have a recordable hard drive - that's coming in just the next couple of years.
Ashley Hill: Whatever the technology, it's got to be fast and it's got to be easy to use because television is a passive activity at the moment.
To use any extra gadgetry you have to make an effort. If the machinery helps you not to make too much of an effort then it will be more successful.
Ten years is actually quite a short time for people to change their viewing habits. We still only have a third of the country cabled up or dished up.
I suspect that in 10 years there won't be any huge changes.
BM: I think that in the past 10 years we've been led by a lot of hype about what the possibilities are going to be and everybody's expected these possibilities to arrive much quicker than they have. This is the year when the possibilities finally start to come into our homes.
Uptake is going to become much quicker as the older population moves off the map and the Nintendo generation gets married and buys homes.
I also believe we have to segment the market. Some of the market we really are not that concerned about. Some of the market doesn't want to watch any more TV. It's like banks with customers - some customers they really want and other customers they have no interest in.
AH: But that's for the business. We're trying to discover who's going to use this new technology.
BM: What I'm saying is, if we're developing systems to get a much higher grade of consumer so we have a great deal more profit and margin coming from them, this is where TV is going to be driving itself. It's just an efficiency scenario.
AH: So the technology will be very business-based then?
BM: Yes. But in the same sense it also has to be easy for people to use. Right now most of the internet and most of computing is a nightmare.
It's for the select few who can understand it and most people don't want to be bothered with it. That's the failing of this whole IT revolution. In the next few years we are going to make vast improvements in this area because of the speed of processors and our understanding of interactivity.
AH: I think that is essential because, as you say, the attitude people have to the internet will be the same one they bring to technology for selecting channels and recording.
BM: Unless we make it easy for people to get what they want as quickly as possible, the more channels you give people the more they're going to be confused and the less enjoyment and benefit they're going to get out of television.
AH: And they'll be frustrated by not being able to cope with the amount that is on offer.
BM: I'm frustrated with the amount of information and the quality of information that's out there with many things, not just television.
AH: This leads to another point - I agree that listings magazines are restricted in the sense that they have limited space. On the other hand, they are very flexible and easy to use.
You can look at something on the way home at night and see what's on TV on the main channels and people are going to pick favourite channels.
No-one's going to pick from the whole range; they're going to settle down to half-a-dozen favourite channels. But at least you just pick up a listings magazine and look at it and you've got the answer straightaway.
BM: I don't think you have the answer straightaway. I think Radio Times should produce listings for people who are interested in sports. Radio Times should produce listings for people who want to redecorate their houses. They could target advertising and programmes to viewers who fall into several categories, as well as generic ones. But whenever you're dealing with the generic audience you have to make a lot of sacrifices to pare down.
AH: Yes, you do. But the interest of most of the population lies in general entertainment. I think that the electronic programme guides (EPGs) will be used as a supplement if people want to find out about sport or if they want to know if there's a John Wayne movie on. I think that's absolutely right but I think they will still be supplementary to the listings magazines. I don't think they will replace them - not for a long time, anyway. If you look at what people actually watch, they watch the soaps and movies and really good documentary series and very good comedy.
BM: In the mail order industry we're finding there's a 15 per cent drop in the use of catalogues because of the use of the internet alone. A paper-based communication system such as the Radio Times is slowly going to decline. At present EPGs are not suitable to provide as much information or as targeted information as they should.
AH: That's the point. I think we tend to judge all these things by what we see of them at the moment. They're so obviously inadequate at the moment that we can't see (take-up) will happen quickly.
BM: For you as a scheduler, if you were able to communicate directly to those people who had an interest in the programmes instead of having to deal with surveys or feedback in the way that you do now, if you had a much more direct link to those people who are watching your programmes and if the people who are producing those programmes also had much higher levels of marketing feedback, you could all be making decisions that would be a lot more effective.
AH: Well, I'm not sure it would make the scheduling more effective.
It would be a nightmare, frankly, if I had access to all the viewers. You can't actually schedule an evening as precisely as that; you don't have the programmes that are that precise.
BM: You're not going to have to. What we're saying is that in the next two years people are going to programme themselves. They're going to take the programmes and record them and watch them when they want. They're going to guide their own schedules.
AH: You don't actually want to reschedule a whole evening. Some people will; there'll always be a third of the population who will. But if people can go home and see that there's a Coronation Street and a Bond movie on, they're not going to say to themselves 'let's see what else there is' or 'let's re-schedule a programme we recorded last week'. The development you're speaking about will happen very slowly. I think it will be a long time before people really want to reschedule a whole evening on their own.
BM: What I want is to be able to know that programmes that have an interest and a benefit to me are available. And through the current structure of EPGs and TV guides I don't really get that shouting out. You're so busy that when you grab the Radio Times you have to find that on page 79 there's one little box that might say something about a subject that you're interested in. What I really want - and I'm not saying I'm representative of the whole public but of some of the public - is a programme guide to tell me there's this programme here, you should watch it or record it or at least consider it.
AH: Yes I do think that is a definite gain but it's a supplementary gain. Even now the number of people who record things and don't watch them is quite substantial. You get to that stage where you think you've got it on the shelf so you've seen it. It's the psychology of 'I've recorded it' so eventually you don't watch it because you think the conversation is over.
BM: What this is really about is people's ability to use the content, the information that they're being assaulted with. People haven't been educated in how to filter out the information and how to use it to best benefit. This is an educational issue. It's something that has to start very early with children in schools. What I believe is that the more choice we give people the higher the quality of content they could access. But they won't be able to access it unless they have systems to help them do that.
AH: That's right, if they do make use of that and use it 100 per cent.
I simply doubt there will be the energy there to do that. The evidence now is that whenever one of the major channels does something really attractive to the audience, the cable and satellite figures go down.
BM: That's an economic argument. They don't have a penetration.
AH: But I'm talking about in the multi-channel homes themselves. People only go to the other channels when there's nothing on the main channel.
I expect that kind of specificity will take a long time to break down.
BM: The British public is not an early-adapting type public.
AH: Exactly. I think we're disagreeing about the timescale and degree.
BM: We're being pushed out by the Nintendo generation that expects everything to have all of this interactivity. They don't think it's unusual to be able to do your banking on TV because you do it on your computer - what's the difference?
AH: I'm sure that sort of thing will increase enormously because it's a practical benefit. Viewing habits are a different thing because they're a means of relaxation.
BM: The generation behind our generation - the Nintendo generation, which has spent more time on Nintendo and Sega and where the editing has been much quicker - want a great deal more involvement, interactivity and highly specified products brought to them.
The most profitable segment of the market will be requesting more and more from TV.
AH: When we commission programmes we're aware of what the overall market is and of what sales people want but they don't take part in scheduling decisions. Planners and schedulers in TV stations create what they think is an attractive schedule for all viewers as well as sales people. I think that will go on because if you don't do that, if you're too precise in your targeting, then your volumes go down.
BM: I don't think it's a disadvantage that your volumes come down because the effect of the audience that you do have is going to be much greater than what we're presently working with.
AH: It may be commercially greater, yes, but we still have a notion of public service which says we must provide a service for a large number of viewers because people are judged by volumes.
BM: But if most viewers watching programmes feel they have a much greater benefit to them I think their final vote is going to be that they're enjoying TV much more.
AH: If that's the case. But that does presuppose a situation where, away from all the big channels, there's going to be this wonderful array of programming that's more attractive to them. I suspect there will only be one or two every week that will be more attractive to them. So I don't think this feeling of well-being that you describe will be very widespread.
BM: One of the changes we're seeing now is that broadcasting isn't confined to the large companies. People are going to start producing TV shows.
Some of the most popular things are cameras inside dorm rooms. People will start developing home-grown programmes that will compete against anything else.
AH: I think you overestimate the ability of people to make popular programmes.
BM: I'm not saying a majority of programming is going to come out of this area. But some will come out of a zero budget like The Blair Witch Project - people will want to watch real TV for real people just like all these shows came in about watching people in real situations. TV will reach a new level of reality when people around the world will be able to record events with inexpensive, high-quality cameras, stick that on the net, web stream it or put it on digital channels.
AH: But we - the terrestrial channels and Sky - do now produce a quantity of programming that a lot of people want to watch a lot of. There will be some specialist stuff but there will not be a lot of it. To produce mass entertainment drama and comedy and very good current affairs you do need more than ordinary ability. The viewer demands high-quality programming. If you provide that they will turn up; if you don't provide it they won't. It's a quality argument. We on C5 managed to get some idea of what the heavy viewer wants.
We can't just throw anything out. We've had to try to do something different from the other terrestrials, partly by scheduling.
BM: We're dinosaurs coping and adapting as best we can but we're slow-witted and the meteor is about to hit us.
AH: I think you're absolutely right about interactivity. The new generation will come up and it will be just like a pen and pencil to them. I still think the different element in TV is that the quality of the programming draws people or doesn't draw them. Unless outside of the five channels you have a huge raft of really attractive programming that we simply don't know about - which I don't think is the case - TV viewing will be very slow to change.
Ashley Hill is head of scheduling, Channel 5 - Britain's youngest terrestrial channel, launched in 1997. Budd Margolis is consultant, MIT Consulting, which is developing DigiGuide, an internet-based listings guide.
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