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.
ITV Network’s first head of technology discussed the big developments in television or what he referred to as “the fun factory”, from the early 1960s when he worked in ABC TV’s engineering research department at Teddington Studios to ITV in the 1990s.
At ABC he worked on the problems of using colour film in television and, in particular, on The Avengers. He went on to develop the first computer-controlled presentation switcher in Europe.
In late August, RTS London invited a panel of Arrow representatives, chaired by Muki Kulhan, to explain how the factual indie did it.
Production executive Carrie Pennifer explained that lockdown had meant no shooting or access to the edit suite, and everyone working remotely. Post-production manager Kyran Speirs had more than 20 unfinished programmes to deliver.
Since starting at the BBC in 1961, he has worked on some of the UK’s most loved shows, including Dad’s Army and Morecambe and Wise.
In a new RTS London film, It’s All About the Sound, McCarthy discusses his career at the BBC and as a freelancer with Strictly Come Dancing sound supervisor Richard Sillitto, a colleague over many years.
