What does 2024 hold for the TV industry? Hosted by Katie Prescott, panellists Claire Enders, Dan Clays, Ash Atalla, Patrick Holland and Evan Shapiro discuss their 2024 TV predictions at an RTS event, from freelancing, to viewing habits, to the effects of geopolitical events and AI.
Panel
Local content offers a way forward for UK broadcasters and producers – in television, big is not always best. In the “new era of media”, claimed media cartographer Evan Shapiro during an effervescent presentation: “The user is in complete control of what they’re watching.”
Focusing on the big tech players that dominate his map of the most valuable media and tech companies, he said: “You can’t beat them at scale. In fact, in many cases, you have to work with them and compete with them simultaneously… you have to both bear-hug them and keep them at arm’s length.
US screenwriters went on strike in early May when the Writers Guild of America (WGA) was unable to reach agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), which represents studios and streamers such as NBCUniversal, Warner Bros. Discovery, Disney, Amazon/MGM and Netflix.
Claire Enders offered a robust defence of public service broadcasting in delivering the RTS Scotland Campbell Swinton Lecture to a sold-out lecture room at BBC Scotland in November.
The founder and owner of media researcher firm Enders Analysis backed the Scottish Government’s media policy. “Here, the administration believes that public service broadcasting is a fundamental good for all and believes in the core market interventions – the BBC, Channel 4 – that have been developed over almost a century,” she said.
Philippe Dauman, Chief Executive of Viacom, the media empire created by nonagenarian Sumner Redstone, has been called many things in his long Viacom career.
One is "dauphin", marking both his succession potential and the fact that he is French-born. Although he has lived almost all of his life in the US, Dauman is a fluent French speaker.
He is "an iron fist in a velvet glove" according to Sir Martin Sorrell, Chief Executive of WPP. The New York Times summed him up as "The man who would be Redstone".
