Business Roundtable: Report 14
Cross Media and its Connection to Interactive Radio and TV
Strategies television and radio stations should develop to serve the needs of future consumers.
A Business Roundtable at the ICNM - International Center for New Media, Salzburg, Austria on the 13th of March 2004. Author: Christian Bauer (bauer@icnm.net)
Executive Summary
The increasing diffusion of broadband connections offers new possibilities for so far monomedia oriented companies to offer multimedia/cross-media services. To anticipate the future of media evolution is the primary task for every business executive in this field. This roundtable discussion addresses especially to radio and TV makers who are interested in the future of media built around the key factors interactivity, virtualisation, and personalisation.
Digital technologies have revolutionized a great number of fields, from CDs to mobile communications. One of the great challenges for the coming years is to identify how these changes are relevant in the field of broadcasting.
The PC and broadband area had a lasting effect in the change of ways of reception as well of demands amongst the younger generation and other generations will continuously also follow this way. These developments were realised by most broadcasters but hardly implemented yet.
In the analogue broadcasting area all programmes and formats were time based, fixed to a given schedule. Digital broadcasting opens the way to interactivity and to transform time-fixed services to services on demand, available any time. This change in the horizon of time will change our relationship to TV as a whole. After been downgraded in appreciation for decades it will make it a more valuable media again. This means a valorisation of the broadcasting business as a whole.
But not only any time availability (Video on Demand, VoD) of quantity of content is the key to success. Crucial to the success of broadcasters in the digital age is to provide added value services. The essential shift in services must be to individualisation / personalisation. TV is definitely going to become a personalised/individual media, unlike when started in the mid of the 20th century it was a media of collective reception and identity donor. This role has been nearly lost at all, even by public broadcasters.
The premise to make the market of iTV develop quickly is that interactive formats and services provide real added value in comparison to analogue and digital TV without return channel. The faster it develops the cheaper it gets for consumers and the faster it grows again – dynamic is coming to market.
Another success factor is standardisation. An ongoing collaborative effort to come to common standards for interactive broadcasting is inevitable to avoid the current situation of varying standards within Europe. It is necessary to decide on, promote and support MHP for satellite (DVD-S), for cable (DVB-C) and terrestrial (DVB-T) interactive TV to create an overall and consistent European market. This is a unique chance to create our own European market with MHP.
Small producers and companies in the digital TV market shall be enabled to sell their products to the whole European market without paying licence rights for proprietary systems like “Open TV”.
Recommendations
Since content was often seen as a commodity, not as something valuable and rare, explicit content strategies and policies for EU member states shall be developed through special competence centres.
One of these strategies to gain high quality content could be the development of new funding models for new media contents – e.g. similar to film funding, where a small percentage of cinema tickets or public broadcasting fees goes to film funds. These resources should be more opened to multimedia contents for interactive platforms (e.g. iTV, Web).
Regulations and legal frameworks concerning the authorization of broadcasters and fee policies must take into consideration both socio-political as well today’s and upcoming market, i.e. commercial aspects. EC Directives shall reconsider current models and reflect future developments and have sustainable influence on national broadcasting regulation.
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