2011 – the most predictable year since records began?
Raymond Snoddy becomes a fortune-teller for the day – “everyone can head off to celebrate Christmas in the queues at Heathrow secure in the knowledge that 2011 is sorted. Well, apart from Vince Cable that is – when a politician becomes totally ridiculous the consequences are always inevitable”…
It’s a really bad year for Oracles – particularly media Oracles. Not because it’s particularly difficult to forecast the future. The problem is this year it is far too easy.
In fact 2011 could be the most predictable year since records began. Even the summer will be predictably hot. The more you think about it, the worse it gets as far as media Oracles are concerned.
Instead of 18 months, or even two years of tasty speculation about the BBC licence fee settlement, the damned thing has been settled for the next six years with very predictable consequences for posts, pay and programmes.
Over at ITV Archie Norman and his friend Adam Crozier never hesitate to point out they have a five-year plan for the future – changing the balance between pay and advertising revenue, building up the production base both at home and abroad and sitting on Simon Cowell’s tail to produce the Big Blockbuster quiz.
Where’s the room for serendipity there?
ITV revenues will rise but not by as much as expected. Ditto profits and share price. How predictable is that.
All would-be media Oracles should at least be grateful that Lord Birt, Tony Blair’s blue-sky thinker, appears to have retired from the field of battle. Five-year forecasts were meat and drink for Lord Birt and if you asked him nicely he would run you up a 10-year-forecast or even a 20-year special.
An end to uncertainty not just history.
Over at the rough end of the market, the future of Channel 5 is completely assured and the flow of redundancies will dry to a trickle. Not even Richard Desmond has yet managed to invent a fully automated television channel which employs no one at all, apart perhaps from an ad sales force – though there are persistent rumours that he is working on just such a concept.
The future of Channel 4 is comfy, cosy and assured as the new team in charge, Lord Burns and chief executive David Abraham, pursue a Back To The Future policy. They have faced reality – rather than reality television – and embraced the spirit of the times: self help. Haven’t we all.
We can also predict with absolute certainty that towards the end of the year there will be an outbreak of local television in the UK. This will happen because culture secretary Jeremy Hunt is like a dog attached to a trouser-leg and won’t let go and because the BBC has to provide an initial £25 million plus £5 million a year in support.
Who wouldn’t want to fill their boots with some of that?
The crystal ball is going unexpectedly hazy on the prospects for Channel 6 – the plan to support lots and lots of local TV stations with a national spine of advertising-funded television.
Lazards banker Nick Shott – or should that be Lord Shott – unfortunately advised the culture secretary that Channel 6’s assumptions are unreasonably optimistic and that the scheme is merely a way of launching a new national television channel by the back door. The consequences seem predictable. After the initial flurry – no local TV and no Channel 6.
It is equally certain that the BBC director-general Mark Thompson, who honestly believes that he negotiated not just the best deal in the circumstances but a “good” licence fee settlement, will stay on to implement his good fortune.
Except that is if a new chairman of the BBC decides in the best traditions of the corporation that it is yet again time to fire a director-general. After all there have been no DG defenestrations since Greg Dyke.
But the new BBC chairman – a decent Tory Lord Patton seems a predictable bet – will surely decide to save licence payer’s money and not give Thompson a big golden good-bye. Watch, however as the rolling one-year contract is “voluntarily” renegotiated and turned into a fixed contract on more modest terms.
But the really predictable things are the ones that aren’t going to happen in 2011.
Rupert Murdoch won’t give up his paywalls despite the growing flow of data suggesting it is not one of his better ideas.
At least Murdoch will have the money to continue funding his newspapers as he gets his hands on all of BSkyB – the result of Hunt getting his hands on the decision rather than Vince Cable, who has tap-danced his way out of any influence if not entirely out of power. When a politician becomes totally ridiculous the consequences are always inevitable.
No national newspapers will close in 2011 and there is no chance whatever that around 650 regional newspapers will be gone by 2013. The original, wildly pessimistic prediction, was the work of a lesser Oracle – Claire Enders.
CRR will not be abolished though there is clearly room for modest reform.
Even when viewed through pink-tinted special glasses 3D TV will not set the world alight in 2011.
You will definitely need the pink-tinted glasses, or maybe that’s a magnifying glass, to see the progress of YouView next year.
Channels will not disappear – if anything the power of established brands will increase as more and more dross oozes onto the screen.
Enough of this negativity – on-demand television will at last make the major break-through. It can be confidently predicted that in 2011 the share of the total TV market taken by on-demand will soar from the present 6% – all the way up to 7%.
But don’t get carried away, most of that increase will still come from mere, good old-fashioned catch-up television.
The Prime Minister will not unleash a complete deregulation of commercial radio despite a sage word of advice from his media mate Kelvin Mackenzie.
Kelvin, the man behind L!ve TV and talkSPORT, even went on to tell his friend Dave that after commercial radio he could give commercial TV the same treatment.
As an honest man Kelvin didn’t even try to talk up the Prime Ministerial response. “Mmmmm,” replied the former Carlton director of communications.
So rest assured. Everyone can head off to celebrate Christmas in the queues at Heathrow secure in the knowledge that 2011 is sorted. No news really is good news.