Has TV been Googled?

A new series of blogs about the broadcast industry, narrated by David Brennan…

Having let the dust settle, allowing me time to watch Eric Schmidt’s MacTaggart lecture in its entirety, I was struck by his sincerity, self-deprecation (“if we were responsible for TV programming, you’d get a lot of bad sci-fi”) and an innate understanding of where TV fits in the new media eco-system.

He came to praise TV, not to bury it, and provided some excellent examples to prove his point – for example, that we consume on average as much TV in four days as we spend online in a month.

I also felt, however, a sense of condescension when he talked about British media; our lack of computer development skills, our reliance on cottage industries, our lack of entrepreneurship (especially given how many things we have invented) and the suffocating impact of over-regulation. There was a sense of – “you quaint little Brits, with your cute creativity” – that I found difficult to engage with.

Consequently, I thought I’d use this piece to express my disagreement with several things Dr. Schmidt covered in his speech. In particular, the argument that we’d be a much more successful nation if only we had more engineers (brilliantly critiqued in Ray Snoddy’s column last week.)

Now, I’ll confess to a vested interest here; I don’t want to be surrounded by engineers. I’m sure they are lovely people, but in the ‘luvvies vs. geeks’ paradigm Dr. Schmidt set up, I’d much rather hang out with the luvvies.

It may be a redundant argument anyway, because we may already have an oversupply of the science graduates he suggests we lack. A report published just a couple of days ago, from the Higher Education Statistics Agency, suggests that half of all science graduates fail to find jobs matching their degree; among engineers the figure was 54%. So, providing more vocational courses in these fields may not necessarily be productive in itself.

But I also disagree that a shift from luvviedom to geekdom will be the answer to all of our problems. The creative industries currently employ almost two million people; are responsible for 8% of GDP (about the same as the financial sector!); have been growing at more than twice the level of overall economic growth since the mid 1990s and are estimated to be worth more to the UK, relative to its size, than any other economy in the world.

One example, television, shows the UK often contributing up to half of all international programme format sales in any one year; not bad for a country representing less than 2% of the global population! Maybe what we really need is more luvvies…

This is where one other area Dr. Schmidt addressed – regulation – does get me nodding in agreement. The creative industries produce these results from creating things of real value to society, so what do government and the regulators do? They restrict success (e.g. Project Kangaroo), they limit scale (e.g. CRR) and they cut off support (e.g. scrapping financially viable organisations such as The Film Council). Compare and contrast to government attitudes towards banking, which provides less of social value (according to the governor of the Bank of England) and generate it with other people’s money. I agree, Dr. Schmidt – the regulators are truly the bogeymen in this chilling bedtime story.

Finally, a point about how and why Google TV may not be the answer to all of our dreams. Schmidt emphasises Google’s approach, based on algorithms plus recommendations, will lead to a new era of television, which is “always exciting, often serendipitous, but always worth your time”.

I agree with Ray Snoddy that an algorithmic approach to TV programming has severe limitations; TV viewing is usually shared (so whose algorithms?), highly context-sensitive and quite random and whimsical. That is why Google TV has struggled in this area.

But I was impressed that he picked up on the serendipitous nature of TV viewing, something that I believe is a great driver of viewing but is best delivered by a trusted editor who instinctively understands the audience needs at different times of day. That is one of the main reasons why the linear schedule still dominates – we don’t want to work too hard at choosing and we want to think we are ‘sharing’ that experience in real time with millions of other people. Something that can never be fully satisfied by algorithms nor recommendation.

I agree with Schmidt that “TV is on the verge of a new golden age… where there is something wonderful to watch every waking minute… and the UK is primed to lead the way” and I believe the technologies that have created Google are behind that bright future.

But I don’t necessarily agree that if we all became a little more like Google that would get us there faster. Quite the contrary, I believe our core strengths in the creative industries should be nurtured, encouraged and properly funded, otherwise we may be even more reliant on the banks for our economic performance in the future.