digital

Tim Davie, the BBC’s Director-General, has called for urgent action to ensure that British media can prosper into the 2030s. He said the BBC must work together with politicians, policymakers, regulators, and other parts of the sector to secure the future of a world-leading UK media market.

The partnership is part of Channel 4’s mission to become a digital first broadcaster for younger audiences. 

The deal will mean that hundreds of hours of Channel 4 and E4 hit shows such as 8 Out Of 10 Cats, SAS: Who Dares Wins and The Dog House will be available on YouTube.            

Channel 4 will also be able to sell its own advertising around the shows, allowing an increase in new revenue streams.

For ITV, the pandemic forced the company to do some hard thinking. Advertising revenue fell off a cliff in the second quarter of 2020, programme ­budgets were slashed, and senior executives took voluntary pay cuts.

“Commercially, we were very worried about our cash situation in the first three or four months of the pandemic,” CEO Carolyn McCall told her interviewer, BBC News’s Dharshini David. “We took some dramatically difficult decisions in the first three weeks of the pandemic because we had to preserve our cash.”

The UK is facing “a total loss of cultural sovereignty”, which risks leaving the country culturally impoverished unless action is taken to stop US giants such as Netflix from dominating the media landscape.

This was the frank message from Mark Thompson, the former Director-General of the BBC who, for seven years since 2012, has been engaged in a wholesale transformation of The New York Times from a print company into a digital-based global news operation with 5 million subscribers.

Why will young people care about this? he asked at today’s Edinburgh International Television Festival, as he unveiled a slate of new programmes for the digital channel.

Billy Wizz

Among the commissions is a documentary telling the remarkable story of driver Billy Monger, one of Britain’s most exciting new racing drivers, who last year was involved in an accident which resulted in the loss of both legs.

At a joint event put on by RTS London and the Federation of Commercial, Audiovisual Libraries (FOCAL) in late February, the experts said that – although it is a huge task – they would be able to digitise the best of telly’s vast archive of tape programmes. 

Steve Daly, head of technology at BBC Archives described his job as “looking after everything the BBC would like to keep forever”. This includes paper records, radio archives, sheet music, social media archive and music libraries, as well as telly programmes.

The innovative campaign for the first series in 2015, which displayed no Channel 4 logos, was designed to hoodwink the public into thinking that “synthetic humans” were available to purchase.

As part of a teaser campaign for the series, the 4Creative team – including senior digital producer Savvides – created a fictional brand, “Persona Synthetics”, which manufactures the “synths” –artificial humans – in the programme.