Report

Sam Bowers from RTS Futures and film-maker and lecturer Athena Mendis discussed the opportunities available to young people in the media industry. 

Mendis teaches production and screenwriting at Queen Mary University of London’s Department of Film Studies Department. She has made short films and documentaries, which have been screened at film festivals around the world.

She is currently in pre-production on two short films, Losing Grace and Daughter and in post-production with a documentary on the Greek diaspora of North London.

A report by Ofcom released this week found that the number of households with a subscription to a streaming platform in the first three months of this year (15.4m), exceeded pay-TV homes by around 300,000. 

In 2017, more than half (55%) of adults reported that they watched content on-demand.

In his presentation, “The right stuff”, Hinkson discussed the copyright challenges facing TV in the digital age, arguing that rights owners need, like never before, to protect their assets.

In the past, copyright infringement generally concerned the illegal copying of DVDs and videos; now it is streamed content where copyright regulations are being breached.

Hinkson outlined copyright legislation and the legal cases in Ireland, the UK and Europe of most relevance to television to the RTS Centre.

The managing director of media consultancy Decipher looked to a future where more and more households – which, he said, for a family of four, now have an average 25 screens – would be able to easily connect all their TVs, computers, tablets and phones into a single “whole home network”.

Newish products such as the Sky Q box allow viewers to watch around the house and it and other developments, argued Walley, marked “yet another shift [in power] to the platforms” and away from the broadcasters.

“We thought it was the right time to do something big about the NHS – it was encountering lots of problems and it was being treated as a political football.

“We wanted to get over what was happening right now in the NHS and aimed for broadcast in January when the NHS often faces a winter crisis,” explained BBC Two commissioning editor Danny Horan at the event, which was held at ITV London Studios.

To demonstrate how far today’s sophisticated promo has come, the continuity announcer and TV presenter Gavin Inskip, who chaired the event, showed a BBC One trailer from an October Saturday in 1980. This featured nothing more than clips from the coming night’s schedule, which included shows featuring Larry Grayson, Paul Daniels and Michael Parkinson.

In contrast, Channel 4’s three-minute promo for the Rio Paralympics last year, which was one of a number of clips shown at the event, featured a big band, dancers and hundreds of athletes, all of whom had a disability.

Above: Non Gwilym, Tim Hartley, Emma Meese (C4CJ), Bruce Etherington (Prifysgol Caerdydd), Ken Skates AM, Karen Roberts, a Sarah Mosely

Above: Tim Hartley with Guto Harri

London media view of Wales 'not ignorant'

Wales does not get a 'rough deal' from the London media, argued News UK director of communications Guto Harri in the RTS Wales Centre Annual Lecture on the 7th November.  He also held out the prospect that "a Sun office in Swansea or Cardiff is not out of the question".

Above: Chris Buxton, John Geraint, and Xavier Alford

 
When Worlds Collide

"There are now plans to reflect adverts off the moon", said Professor Justin Lewis, as he argued that all television is ultimately driven by a hidden consumerism.  That was just one of the many insights gained as the Wales Centre paired academics with television professionals for one-to-one dialogue and debate at Cardiff University’s School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies on the 24th October.