RTS London

NBCUniversal International named lead sponsor of RTS London Conference 2016

As leader of one of the world’s largest media and entertainment companies, Burke will share his views on global media trends, how NBCUniversal is capitalising on shifts in consumer, technological and market dynamics, and his expectations for the future.

 

RTS London Student Awards 2016

This year's RTS London Student Awards Ceremony will be hosted by Ore Oduba, the rising star of sports broadcasting and a regular face on the UK’s leading morning news programme, BBC Breakfast,

Tickets are available for the nominees and their university staff, with 20 available on ballot for members to attend and network with the next generation of TV creatives.

Evan Shapiro on the future of streaming, PSBs and TikTok

The day before filling a panellist’s chair at the RTS National Event “2024 TV predictions”, in late January, media universe cartographer and analyst Evan Shapiro appeared solo at a sold-out RTS London session.

“Content remains king – that’s not going to change,” he told a rapt Everyman King’s Cross audience. However, he added, there is a misperception “that most television watched on Earth is streaming – it’s just not true”.

The ethics of true crime in television

The Christmas before last, you might have expected the most streamed programme in the UK to be The Holiday or Elf. In fact, it was My Lover My Killer, the Netflix series exploring the cases of murder victims who meet tragic ends after relationships turn deadly. It’s not typical festive fare, but testament to the mushrooming market for true crime, via TV – both factual and drama – as well as podcasts and, increasingly, TikTok.

Sky Arts' Portrait Artist of the Year turns 10

Over the past decade Sky Arts’ Portrait Artist of the Year has emerged as one of the channel’s flagship shows – and one in which skill triumphs over exhibitionism. As Sky Arts’ supremo, Phil Edgar-Jones, said: “The show is not all about loud, mad characters but people doing something well.”

He was speaking at an RTS London event, “Portrait Artist of the Year at 10”, where he was joined by members of the production team at independent producer Storyvault Films, and which was chaired by the company’s founder Stuart Prebble, also an executive producer on the show.

Munya Chawawa on using TikTok to break into television

Frustrated that he couldn’t get a break in TV, comedian Munya Chawawa took to impersonating celebrity offspring. “I was so desperate… I told a TV agent that I was Idris Elba’s son, which obviously you can’t verify until you see the person. I’d turn up and they’d say to me: ‘Look. If you had 30,000 followers, maybe we’d talk to you. We like your showreel but you’ve got no profile.’”

Chawawa felt his comedy suited TikTok’s “quick bursts of entertainment…. Most videos have one punchline at the end, so my rule was that I was going to have 11 punchlines in 60 seconds.”

Can smartphones be used for cinematography?

It served as a jumping-off point for a look at examples of work by Steven Soderbergh and Ridley Scott shot on smartphones to demonstrate how far these devices can go in the hands of expert cinematographers.

Mulcahy revealed how to get the most out of these powerful ‘entertainment devices’. Tips on framing, sound and storytelling kept the audience enthralled. A full house used the Q&A to ask about squeezing out the most from their iPhones and the best editing software to use. The event was produced by David Thomas and held at the University of Westminster in mid-May.

A1 access for BBC archive

An RTS London event last month heard that the BBC TV archive – the largest broadcast archive in the world – contains more than half a million unique programmes and that 85% have been digitised.

Claire Coss, head of product, library and curatorial services, BBC Archives Technology & Services, is based at the BBC Archive Centre in Perivale, west London. She explained that for many years BBC archive teams have helped content-makers “to reuse and reimagine the content we hold”.

How BBC's Sunday Morning Live became a UK-wide production

Earlier this year, a joint bid from two Northern Ireland indies – Tern TV Belfast and Green Inc – won the tender to produce 24 episodes a year of Sunday Morning Live, BBC One’s ethical and religious current affairs show. 

The show is broadcast live from a London studio, using producers and directors in Glasgow, Manchester and Sheffield, but is produced and edited in Holywood, Northern Ireland. It sounds complicated but it works, as a recent joint RTS London/Yorkshire event discovered.