A field full of cows

A field full of cows.

A real-estate developer looks at it. Without cows on the field the land could have value.

A butcher looks at it. How many trucks would he need to take the cows to slaughter?

A child looks at it. She sees milk.

A television executive looks at it. He needs a girl with great hair to stand in front of the cows holding a microphone.

We all tend to look at things from the perspective we are most familiar with. As a television executive I again participated in the program markets, MipTV and MipCom 2006, in Cannes and attended many conferences. These events, and similarly well-intentioned gatherings in Las Vegas during the National Association of Broadcasters meet, covered a wide range of topics. Many of these were related to the technologies which are changing broadcasting so dramatically, IPTV, DVB-H, VOD – the whole alphabet soup of novel delivery options – and to innovative content formats – vlogs, mobisodes, mash-ups – which for many experienced television professionals remain a strange no-man’s land.

All of this I tried to make sense of, to place in the familiar context of making television.

Ten years ago this might have been the right way to approach things. Then we, the producers and broadcasters, were the ones with all the cameras, all the equipment, all the know-how for making and delivering televised entertainment. We knew our industry, we were a confident, thriving and powerful media sector.

Now, for one thing, we have no a monopoly of electronic cameras. There are probably almost as many electronic image capture devices – cameras - in the hands of commercial pornographers (supplying a $ 57 billion world wide industry) as there are in the studios of professional broadcasters. As many again in the schools, colleges and churches, where dedicated A/V budgets of over $ 100K are increasingly common. Add the wedding photographers. Add the multitude of surveillance cameras which track our daily movements. Add, finally, the digital video cameras owned by families and individuals.

Today the cameras deployed by traditional broadcasters, ten years ago the monopolists, are just a small percentage of all the devices out there in the wild capable of recording audiovisual content of constantly improved quality.

Nor are the only screens displaying an RGB signal those dedicated to the reception of our broadcast output. Yes, we are aware that we must serve other delivery systems, from PDA, through PMP to cell phone, that we’ll be subject to TiVo and DVR and that DRM might, but almost certainly won’t save us from P2P. But many screens are not even reliant of what we as television professionals offer in terms of content. The digital signage sector is booming. The biggest screens in the world, about 750 square meters in surface area and costing over $ 6 million, are not built to show Desperate Housewives. The 42inch plasmas in shopping malls or on subway station platforms are not receiving The Daily Show as their input signal (although maybe they should be). The banks of screens in police headquarters may be showing The Streets Of San Francisco, but its not the Warner Bros version.

To meet the new challenges and exploit the new potential we must try to free ourselves from the perspective we have learned or osmotically assimilated as experienced television professionals. We need to be less limited by what we have learned, to rediscover a sense of awe when confronted with all those digital, networked, interactive, platform agnostic cows out there in the field.

Let’s not just send in the girl with big hair and the microphone. Let’s think milk.