“This year has proved how important this industry is – I know for a fact that if I hadn’t had my TV in my house during lockdown, I would have been climbing the walls,” said the winner of Drag Race’s first UK series.
Looking at the “amazing young, fresh talent” brought together for the online ceremony by Zoom, The Vivienne added: “Knowing that the future of TV is in your hands really puts me at ease.”
Anna and Jörg Winger talk about the ins and outs of concluding the Deutschland 89 saga while doing justice to its characters, and the very real human stories around the fall of the Berlin Wall, alongside how they brought the 80s to life and why the message of the series is more relevant than ever.
But fans of the show discovered at an RTS London event that some of the show’s characters could yet draw new breath.
“The trilogy is over,” confirmed the show’s co-creator Jörg Winger, “but we are currently thinking about a spin-off that is not Deutschland, but maybe follows some of our characters into new territory”.
TikTok has become one of the most talked-about social media launches of recent years, but producers and broadcasters are still in the dark on how best to navigate it.
Watch this session about how independent producers, production companies and all major broadcasters across the UK can better understand how to connect with and be discovered by Millennials, Gen Z and beyond on TikTok, driving new kinds of engagement with their content.
That was the core of an RTS London discussion, “Too much TV!”, which examined how the pandemic is affecting our viewing tastes and why, despite significant progress, platforms need better curation to guide audiences through the labyrinth of peak TV.
As all the panellists agreed, you can’t have too much great TV. Whether there is enough of it is a moot point.
And, perhaps, ultimately, the definition of what constitutes outstanding TV is subjective.
When the UK first went into lockdown in March 2020, Fremantle lawyer Damian Kent told an RTS London event, “productions had to be suspended or stood down generally, so that meant looking at cast, crew and suppliers’ contracts. It meant going to broadcasters and producers, and agreeing what payments needed to be made.... It was an additional cost on the budget.”
David Schwimmer and Nick Mohammed talk about how the Sky series Intelligence was made and how they juggled their roles as actor, producer and writer on the series at this RTS London event.
“There’s so much content and it’s in so many places. Finding a way of navigating, aggregating and personalising that content for the consumer is going to be key,” said Helen Stevens, ITV’s operations officer, content supply & distribution and Chair of the DPP.
Rowan de Pomerai, the DPP’s chief technology officer, added: “Voice search and aggregated watch lists will start to become really important to the way consumers navigate media.”
He called on “content and technology companies to work together”.
Over the past year, SVoD services such as Disney+, HBO Max, Peacock (NBCUniversal) and AppleTV+ have come on stream, joining the likes of Netflix and Amazon.
Alan Wolk, co-founder of media consultancy TV[R]EV, speaking from New Jersey, dubbed the streaming boom a “flixcopalypse”. He said two more – Paramount+ and Discovery+ – were due to launch soon.
Success is not guaranteed. The short-form streamer Quibi, launched by former Disney exec Jeffrey Katzenberg, collapsed this month after only half a year in business.
Normally at this time of year, RTS London partners with the IET to review the International Broadcast Convention in Amsterdam. However, IBC was yet another victim of Covid-19, with events moving online.
Accelerators are fast-track, collaborative innovation projects that address complex media and entertainment industry business and technology challenges. There were eight IBC projects this year, running for around five months.
