The huge increase in consumers going online to video rich websites is one of the most significant recent trends in television, and such sites could pose a threat to UK broadcasters.
This was one of the issues raised at MediaTel Group’s latest ‘Future Of TV’ seminar, held in London yesterday. Rahul Chakkara, controller BBCi believes that the penetration of broadband has been “absolutely spectacular” in the past few years.
“People are increasingly starting to watch video on their laptops,” he said. “If you had asked me two years back I would have said that’s stupid. It’s slow, it’s not going to disrupt anyone at the moment… but one truth about technology is we always over estimate its short-term impact, but we always under estimate its long-term impact.
“For most of this technology, broadband, IPTV etc, there’s a huge hype, we all take part in that hype, and suddenly reality hits and most of us give up and say, well, that didn’t work,” he added. “Because of that, most of us take our eyes off the ball and the technology comes back and it really changes the business mode.”
Chakkara also believes that the market will become more fluid, with more players entering in the coming years. “You’ll have new entrants like BT Vision, HomeChoice maybe with Tiscali’s help expanding itself, maybe a couple of other entrants coming in,” he said. “So suddenly from two or three… the market will go into six, seven different players and it will get very competitive and the competition will impact the prices.”
On the subject of sites like YouTube and Google Video, Chakkara believes that UK broadcasters do face competition because of them in that eyeballs are being directed to sites based in other countries.
However, Clare Salmon, director of marketing and commercial strategy at ITV, was not as convinced. “I think we are acutely aware of the potential impact of this technology and we are ready for that,” she said, mentioning the new UGC focused service, ITV Local. “Just because it’s there doesn’t mean it’s good. You have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find a prince.”
Ford Ennals, chief executive of Digital UK, said that consumers moving online would become even more commonplace in the future and that the rise of web TV and user control would challenge the role of the channels.
“The test of YouTube is that there’s a massive demand for that,” he said. “Broadband is a fundamental shift here and I think we are all going to be accessing a lot more video online. The interesting thing is does this end up being competition to the formal channels that we have at the moment? Increasingly, where we know what we want… we can go online and we’ll be able to find it.
“Are people going to say, well actually I don’t need the channels, I know what I want, I’ll go online. I think that’s going to be a major feature certainly of 2010 onwards. [However] the industry needs to make sure it doesn’t forget the [older consumer] in our rush to embrace new technology. ”
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