The 2019 event, which took place at King’s College in Cambridge on 18-20th of September, was entitled “Content, Consumers, and everything in between”.
The Principal Sponsor for the RTS Cambridge Convention 2019 was ITV.
Ant and Dec will return to reside over a new group of famous faces as they endure the Australian outback.
Across several gruelling weeks, the celebs will face the dreaded Bushtucker Trials and the chance to inherit the crown from 2018’s King of the Jungle Harry Redknapp.
The series will be followed by a new series of I’m A Celebrity…Extra Camp on ITV2, presented by Joel Dommett, Emily Atack and Adam Thomas.
Together, the three hosts will get the inside scoop on life inside the jungle and share lively discussions with special guests.
The late-September event was hosted by the University of Westminster, and chaired by media producer and consultant Aradhna Tayal. It featured Bloomberg media reporter Joe Mayes, London Centre Chair Phil Barnes and James Cordell, a London committee member and first-time attendee at the convention.
The panel noted that one of the key themes throughout was the rise of streaming and whether the already established subscription video on demand (SVoD) companies – with more set to enter the market – will dominate the UK broadcast industry.
Following his speech, in a Q&A with diversity campaigner and advertising executive Karen Blackett, Lenny Henry described the pace of change in the hiring of women and disabled and ethnic-minority people behind the screen as “glacial”. His point was reinforced by the findings of Ofcom’s latest diversity report, discussed in earlier Cambridge sessions.
Will the future of streaming be defined by SVoD (subscription video-on-demand) or free, advertising-funded video-on-demand – or can they both prosper? Those were the big questions addressed by BritBox launch director Reemah Sakaan and Viacom International Media Networks chief David Lynn.
Speaking on the day that the “best of British” SVoD announced a deal with Channel 5, Sakaan was asked by session chair Wayne Garvie how she was going to “persuade my mum and dad to spend £5.99 a month on BritBox”?
Earlier, the RTS convention had been told that, as a brand, Netflix today enjoyed the same high levels of public trust as the BBC. As for the TikTok-using, mobile-addicted members of Generation Z, the BBC looked to be completely under the radar.
Now it was the time for Tony Hall, the BBC’s Director-General, to respond. He did so in a wide-ranging, troop-rallying speech, and argued that, in today’s age of uncertainty, characterised by propaganda and disinformation, the BBC and public service broadcasting were more important than ever.
CEO Alex Mahon made a forthright defence of Channel 4’s place within television’s new ecosystem. She said that channels such as hers were “a vital counterweight to the growing concentration of power that is in the hands of just a few tech behemoths, [which] increasingly decide what we read, what we watch and what we listen to”.
Mahon highlighted the importance of Channel 4’s programmes, which added “piquancy to large domestic audiences”. She said that they resonated “in a way that’s important and big enough to be important to our whole society”.
Christine Lampard: Do you wake in the morning and decide what you want to rant about that day?
Piers Morgan: I used to run a daily paper. And the whole point of it was that, every morning, if you’re running a newsroom with 400 people, you have to get them going with your opinions.
So I think it was always in my DNA to be hugely opinionated about absolutely everything. I try to work myself into indignant rages on most subjects.
'I am one vegan sausage-roll wrap from being fired'
The BBC has responded to the rise of subscription video-on-demand services by extending the iPlayer catch-up window from 30 days to one year.
BBC iPlayer chief Dan McGolpin defended the decision: “TV works in seasons… it means that things which are on a yearly cycle, such as The Apprentice, will be there.” He claimed that audiences, months after transmission, can now be “substantial” – some 40% of Killing Eve’s audience came to the thriller after the original catch-up window.
What a difference two years makes. In 2017, Sky was one of the crown jewels of the vast Murdoch media empire, beloved by investors and publicly traded on the London Stock Exchange. Spool forward to 2019 and Sky is part of Comcast, the US cable conglomerate, which successfully outbid Disney to buy Europe’s biggest pay-TV provider for a staggering $39bn.
