James Rodgers: IPTV Opportunities in Television News Industry

In his article for Celebro Media Networks, James Rodgers states that IPTV offers huge possibilities for television news and current affairs, representing opportunities where previously, for reasons of censorship or cost, there were none.

I spent two decades working as a producer and correspondent in television news. One of the biggest changes I noticed in that time was neatly summed up by a senior BBC News executive in a conversation we had recently. ‘Twenty years ago, when you came to work, you worked on better kit than you had at home. You didn’t have kit at home, did you?’ they pointed out. ‘That is changing.’

The real significance of this is that cost is no longer the same barrier between programme maker and audience that once it was. If you wanted to reach your audience in the past, you used to need access to vastly expensive, professional quality, equipment – and an undertaking from an established broadcaster that they would show your programme once it was finished. No more. If you wanted to head off to cover recent events in the Arab Spring, for example, you could go down to your local computer or camera store and, for a relatively modest outlay, come out with equipment that would allow you to do what the established professionals do.

If that is true of content creation, IPTV is increasingly making it true of distribution, too. Yes, a place on a major, established, platform remains the most reliable way of getting your content to a wider audience. But it is no longer the only way, or the only reliable way. For some years now, the idea of television has ceased to mean terrestrial broadcasting alone. For younger people (like those I teach in my current post as a researcher and lecturer in Media, Communications, and Journalism at London Metropolitan University) the first place you go to for news or other content is not your TV set. It is the internet – either on your laptop, or your mobile phone.

I suggested above that placing your content on a well-established platform remains the most reliable way of getting it to a wider audience. In some cases, that will simply be impossible – especially if you are producing hard-hitting or controversial news or current affairs material. For many years now, the mainstream Russian electronic media have been controlled almost exclusively either by the state, or by companies who are close to (or at least not openly opposed to) the governing administration.

It has been left to the internet to challenge their version of events. The Kremlin’s political opponents have all but given up on the idea of getting their voices heard anywhere else. The most striking recent example was the apparent jeering at the (officially) hugely popular Russian Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin, as he entered the ring to congratulate the winner of a martial arts bout in Moscow.

But, as the BBC News website reported on 21st November 2011, ‘As he started to speak, the audience began booing and hissing, in scenes broadcast live on Russian TV.’ Reports of the event which were broadcast later on Russian Channel 1 apparently edited out much of the jeering – but that was of limited use. Video material which had not been treated according to the orders of the Kremlin’s spin doctors was already widely available to anyone who could be bothered to carry out even the simplest search.

The point here is not that certain audiences will also seek out your content on the internet. In many countries and territories around the world, it has replaced terrestrial and DTH satellite television as the first place which they will look.

There are other things to consider, too. In countries where access to conventional platforms is restricted for reasons of censorship, a web-only presence may be seen as a sign of being more reliable, or free of government control. In other places, it might be seen as being less important. It might also be seen as less reliable. In countries where the broadcast media are seen as more trustworthy, the content which they distribute is more likely to be seen that way too. That, though, is likely to change as the habits of the generation that reaches for the smart phone before the remote control become increasingly mainstream.

The days of people thinking of the media exclusively as printed papers and broadcast terrestrial TV are a long way behind us now. Even if terrestrial TV has not suffered the terminal decline which some people have predicted in recent years, neither is it about to return to the era of audiences which were all but captive for lack of choice.

The big broadcasters know that. As my career as a TV news journalist continued, the organization for which I worked, the BBC, and its fellow major companies were constantly revising and re-examining their output in order to cope with a changing media landscape.

That is not to say that a successful IPTV offer is simple or straightforward. As with any aspect of journalism or broadcasting, you have to have a very clear picture of what your story or idea actually is, who you want to tell it to, and how.

Finding and retaining that audience is not straightforward, and, today, will necessarily involve a social media presence. One of the potential downsides of IPTV is the general contemporary one of fractured audiences – as those terrestrial broadcasters reliant on advertising know only too well. Get that social media presence right, though, and the possibilities are huge. To take two recent – although admittedly light-hearted examples – did the advertising agency for Nando’s in South Africa ever imagine their Christmas campaign featuring dictator lookalikes would be seen far beyond its intended market? Did the hapless dog owner calling his runaway pet in Richmond Park in west London ever think his moment of frustration would be seen worldwide?

Social media ensured that they were. Looking to the future, embracing the change which has come with developments in technology, and sticking to well-established values of good story telling and production values, are likely to prove the two vital elements of a successful IPTV offer.

James Rodgers is Senior Lecturer in International Journalism at London Metropolitan University. From 1990 to 2010, he worked in a wide variety of roles in television journalism – producer, correspondent, editor, and presenter – for Reuters, GMTV, and the BBC. His book Reporting Conflict is due to be published this year by Palgrave Macmillan.

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