The digital revolution has brought many changes, not least the way content is commissioned, consumed and distributed.
WhenIstartedworkinginTVandfilmin2001,therewasavery
different and much more conservative landscape. Creative content was boxed into convenient categories with clear lines between cinema, TV, animation, graphic design, radio, print journalism,
broadcast journalism, corporate video, advertising, music video,
livetheatre,artists’movingimageandliveperformance.Eachbox
came with its own platform, be that exhibition in cinemas, terrestrial broadcast on TV, projections in a conference room or live venue,
graphics on a computer screen, live action in a theatre or street performance space, or video installation in an art gallery. Each box also came with its own funders and gatekeepers. Films for cinematic release were funded mostly by film studios, private investors, small amounts of public funds, tax-relief schemes and TV broadcasters based on a pitched script or treatment, crew and cast list. TV was funded by a rarefied breed of commissioning editors, the top of the TV tree, sitting up in their swanky offices within large broadcasting corporations guarding their purse strings and perusing written scripts and proposals. Corporate video, as it was called then, was a poor cousin to other content and was paid for by corporations to show mostly at events and sometimes on their websites. Ads and music videos were paid for by brands and record companies and made mostly by large, cutting-edge agencies for terrestrial broadcast.
Artist film and video was funded primarily through public funds, galleries and private investors. Product placement was something you only saw in US blockbusters and HBO productions and brand- sponsored content was limited to indents for soap operas. There was a sense of separation between all these things, an internal hierarchy to them, and considerable training and expertise was needed for most of them. Teams needed to make content were much larger and thereforethereweremanymorespecialisedjobsavailable.Although
kit was already beginning to get a lot cheaper, it was nowhere near as
cheap as it is now and this was also a prohibiting factor in producing content and meant that trained specialists and hired equipment were needed a lot more. Budgets were bigger and the volume of content considerably less.
Today, all of this has changed. Digital switchover for TV broadcast only happened in the UK in 2012 but the landscape has changed irrevocably since then. So what has happened?
Well,thereistheemergenceofdigitalplatformslikeNetflix,Vice,
Amazon, Hulu, iTunes, Google Play and the rest. These platforms are the ultimate digital disrupters and have thrown the market into disarray, but also raised the bar for content creation. Then there has been the proliferation of video across all social networks and on platforms like YouTube, Vimeo and Dailymotion for several years, as well as the use of branded content across the board, constant increases in global and domestic digital channels, high- end business promos, campaign videos and virals, the widespread use of animation, sophisticated graphics and CGI across all content, digitisation of cinematic films and TV archive, and the widespread democratisation of the filmmaking process brought about by much lower technology costs. Among other things.
As a result of this audiences have moved online, particularly younger ones. In fact, age demographics, both in terms of audience and content creation, are very important when looking at the digital revolution. Millennials, loosely defined as those born between the 1980s and 2000, are leading the way in all things digital. On the younger end of that generation, some viewers will have never known anything but digital – no terrestrial, cable or satellite viewing, or traditional TV sets for them – and interactivity and user-generated content is as natural as breathing.
According to an Ofcom report, Public Service Broadcasting in the Internet Age: Ofcom’s Third Review of Public Service Broadcasting:
Live television remains hugely important, but catch-up TV and content premiered online is increasingly significant to audiences, especially younger ones. In fact today, only 50% of 16–24s’
viewing, and 61% of 25–34s’, is watched when it’s actually broadcast. Viewing of live TV news by young people also dropped, by 29%, between 2008 and 2014.
There is now a blurring of all categories. Everyone wants to use video content to spread their message, be that big business, small social enterprise, non-profit sector, academia, science and technology, entertainment, retail, arts or creative enterprises. Not so long ago people told their stories in the written word, even on websites – sometimes accompanied by still images. Now almost everyone uses movingimagetogettheirnarrativeacross.Websitesnowusevideo
as a matter of course, no matter what the industry. There is now no need to pay a big, expensive facilities house for camera and editing equipment, and a large crew of people with specialist skills to create content, because the technology has become so cheap and widespread that people can learn it themselves.
The proliferation of Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) set-top boxes, through which TV services are delivered using the internet and integrated with other digital platforms such as social media and gaming, has been a game changer for viewing patterns, content creation and content distribution.
Of course, there will always be specialisms and highly trained people within any sector, and not everyone can make a CGI blockbuster, fixed-rig TV programme or do special effects, high-end graphics or virtual reality. Good writers will always be top of the tree creatively because of an innate talent that can be improved on but can’t really be learned and the best creatives and producers will
generallygetthepickofthebestprojects.Butingeneral,content
is much easier to produce and much higher in volume because of it.
This volume has in turn led to a further blurring of the lines in termsofwhatdifferentcreativecompaniesdo.Whendigitalagencies
first emerged, they mostly concentrated on website and graphics design, ecommerce (selling things online), digital marketing and gaming. Now they do all these things plus film and video production, high-end animation, big social campaigns, branded content for
broadcastersandbusinesstobusiness,educationprojects,music,
360immersiveprojects,gamesandmuchmore.Manyfundersare
turning to small, agile digital agencies to make short-form digital content where once they would have asked traditional production companies, because they can do high turnover, high volume, low cost and have all the complex techie talent in-house.
Traditionally, production companies did TV, radio and film production. Now they overlap hugely with digital agencies because so much of the content they produce is digital. Digital has moved frombeingan‘addon’tobroadcastprogrammesorfilmstobeingthe
main event. Production companies are now expected to deliver very sophisticatedonlineprojectsinadditionto,aspartof,orinstead
of films or programmes that might be broadcast on TV or radio or exhibited in cinemas. Nowadays many production companies also do campaigning,entertainmentoreducationalwebprojectsalongside
their films.
The two have become interdependent and the lines dividing creative content have disappeared with the advent of digital.
The market has become saturated and digital distribution companies are now legion. Standing out and creating your own following, with the help of appropriate platforms that enhance yourbrand,isnowkey–it’sapatchworkthatyouputtogetherina
collaborative process, often with non-exclusive distribution deals.
A huge increase in production company consolidation over the last decade – this means large groups buying up smaller independent companies – has changed the landscape further with content being much less varied and more ‘on brand’ for the parent company.
Global TV entertainment formats such as X Factor, The Voice, Strictly Come Dancing, The Great British Bake Off and the like have become multimediajuggernautsthatjustkeepongoing(althoughinthecase
of Bake Off,Channel4’soutbiddingoftheBBCforownershipofthe
formathashadunintendedconsequenceswithmajortalentleaving
the show). Consolidation has taken place partly in an attempt to keep swimming against the massive tide of global content and competition that the digital revolution has brought about. In such
a market, it is very difficult for the small independent production companyor‘indie’tosurvive,butmanydostillmanageit.