RTS Cambridge Convention 2019

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.

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”?

At this year’s Steve Hewlett Memorial Lecture, former BBC Director-General Mark Thompson recounted a conversation he had had with Netflix CEO Reed Hastings in 2007, during discussions concerning the launch of the iPlayer. According to Thompson, Hastings told him: “I don’t know why you’re bothering, Mark, you’ll never beat my algorithm. Why not just give us all your content instead?”

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.

“That scale allows marketers to reach more people and grow their businesses.

“The need for scale is why we’ve seen so much consolidation across the media industry, including Sky joining Comcast NBCUniversal – and today you can’t achieve new scale without going global.…

“At Comcast NBCUniversal… we put… people at the centre of our strategy; we build scale… towards a shared vision. [This] means doing every part of your business the right way.

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”.

Trust isn’t scientific, it’s instinctive, it comes from the gut, not from the brain,” Martin Lewis told the Cambridge audience, and he should know. The founder of MoneySavingExpert.com, consumer business warrior and the man who sued Facebook and won is also the most trusted man in Britain, according to Google.

Question

Christine Lampard: Do you wake in the morning and decide what you want to rant about that day?

Answer

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'

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.