Jeremy Hunt and his team at DCMS have pulled a real rabbit out of the hat in the dying hours of the spending review. According the Guardian this afternoon, the BBC:
‘..will provide £150m a year for the rollout of superfast broadband to rural areas from 2013 and £25m a year for local TV and online content. A further one-off capital investment in local TV and online services of £25m will also come from the licence fee and the BBC will also underwrite the rollout of the digital radio network nationally.’
Hunt’s proposals simply to regulate an entire local video market into existence were looking iffy, but with some money on the table the game changes. Talk about local has worked with genuinely local online local information and news sites up and down the country. I was on the selection panel for the IFNC. Here’s some quick reactions and challenges for the BBC battered out late at night while recovering from the ‘flu- please excuse any errors or omissions – will update as more news emerges:
- set a new paradigm for regulation – none of the online services i talk to want to be regulated in the baroque way that developed over 50 years for truly mass audiences. Even WitneyTV cited by Jeremy Hunt doesn’t want the faff of being regulated to get on a transmitter. With small audiences you need much lighter regulation. As with other aspects of policy set by the coalition government it’s about moving from rules to trust. For the BBC this might mean some sort of local enclave where simple common sense rules apply to achieve working impartiality. I don’t think the government can actually tell you how to regulate – use your independence to show that it isn’t necessary to carry on as if every item has 10 million viewers, when they in fact have ten and a huge choice of competing views instead of just two as in the 1950s.
- be really local in the natural meaning of the word – local news is about my street, village, town – not the vast area covered by a single transmitter or the colossal and often irrelevant region. Use the privilege of not having to make a profit to do something genuinely non commercial. Locally, the values and needs are quite different. Think say council ward, maybe a borough not a constituency. If i go to the local shops in Northampton I don’t drive to Norwich, which is where my local TV news mainly comes from if i live in N’ton.
- shift medium – local online content is about text, still images and a little audio – video is a minority activity on local sites mainly because it is too time consuming to make (even with a Flip). Don’t take ‘TV’ too literally – move away from the TV heritage and embrace the web – like Audioboo as one or two of your radio stations are.
- change production values – think Dogme and Kevin Smith not Pixar and Baz Lurhmann. Technical fetishism is a huge component of high production costs. Try to do the whole thing without a single studio or makeup artist. More evolution of dance than strictly come dancing.
- make content produced with your money freely reusable by all comers – including local papers under a creative commons licence allowing commercial and non commercial reuse. Give potential complainants something commercially useful
- get out of the traditional media hothouse locations – set up in Wisbech or Wellingborough or Wellington
- please please please don’t try and stretch the DTTV platform at huge cost to something it isn’t intended to do by going really local down to individual transmitters – invest in the local web, costs a fraction. I’m sure you won’t set up a new web platform – use wordpress.com as even Microsoft does, it’s free. Invest in people’s skills capital not technical hardware. [this para edited slightly shortly after publication to correct]
- Find a way for tiny providers to get onto Youview without signing their life away or needing a lawyer
That’s it for now.
William Perrin
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“shift medium – local online content is about text, still images and a little audio – video is a minority activity on local sites mainly because it is too time consuming to make (even with a Flip).”
Agree. But even more importantly than the time constraints of the producer, video is not always (often, even?) the best format to tell the story.
Free from the need to ‘fill airtime’, local online news and information providers can concentrate on delivering to (working with?) audiences in the most appropriate format for the story: text, pics, audio, video, data, interaction, social etc…
Our Ben has just launched his own little WordPress outlet in #Loddon.
http://theloddoneye.wordpress.com/
And agree with the above; what works for Ben and the people of Loddon is for Ben and the people of Loddon to decide.
The only thing is that I’d change is that Ben has to do this out of the goodness of his own heart for the forseeable; cos I don’t see that as sustainable.
He might not be profit driven in the Norman-Crozier sense, but he should at least be able to run a not-for-loss little enterprise.
Video is a minority activity because of the upload constraints on our networks. Not many people have a good enough connection yet to upload more than a couple of minutes. Once we get next generation access you just watch 1000 flowers bloom. A picture says a 1000 words. gigabit or bust.
chris
Hmmnn, ” … set a new paradigm for regulation – none of the online services i talk to want to be regulated in the baroque way that developed over 50 years for truly mass audiences …”
Regulating local TV may be acceptable, if funded by the UK taxpayer, but beware helping the “authorities” open the door on internet regulation that NONE of us want (or will tolerate).
New paradigm indeed!
chris – couldn’t agree more video is only powerful where it is truly needed otherwise it is expensive and otiose – see pointless shots of reporters standing outside the council chamber
rick – good to see your stream of consciousness is still errr gushing
cyberdoyle – i respect your campaigning on bandwidth having spent the first 20 years of my life on an isolated farm, but upload is only a tiny factor. video is simply too much of a faff to capture and edit
russell – i didn’t express myself clearly enough. the government usually wants to procure as a public good news that balanced and accurate. if they are funding that news then it will need a system of regulation to be so, even if that is light self regulation. this is not an open door for regulation of the wider internet – that is already regulated by common law, civil law of copyright, the courts etc.
Is it worth campaigning for a broadcasting equivalent of the Light Railways Act – which defined a class of local small enterprises with lighter regulatory and setup requirements in return for the enterprises being limited in the scope of their activities.
Can local video/news work in concert with regional TV news or will it supplant the likes of Look East/Anglia? Once 1000 flowers bloom – if it actually plays out that way – will the current regional news model be relevant?
Rather obviously, if its £250,000 per station for 100 stations – which is more the Hunt perspective than local boroughs – then give a licence to every university (Production facilities, student slave labour etc.) but insist they spend 25% of peak time open access covering local government – including televised question time for those councils on the Westminster model.