Two events from the last 48 hours signpost the future of television in a multi-channel, multi-platform world.
The first is the conversations on Twitter during the broadcast of X Factor on ITV1. We’ve got use to Twitter providing a backchannel to conferences but on Saturday and Sunday evening it was the choices made by the X Factor judges that generated conversation among Twitter users. There is potential here for incredibly potent TV and additional revenue – just as soon as broadcasters find a mechanism to harness Twitter conversations within the production process.
The second is news that England’s World Cup qualifying match versus Ukraine on Saturday. This game was to be broadcast by failed sports channel Setanta. Instead digital sports specialists Perform will broadcast it over the web for a pay-per-view cost of £4.99. Perform streams more than 15,000 live matches over the internet every year and works with many Premier League and Football League clubs. It’s a fantastic model and it will be interesting to see what size of audience the game attracts and if the UK’s broadband infrastructure hold up.
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Two different beasts here. I think the X-Factor move makes more sense as viewer interaction (voting etc) is essential, and I must commend ITV’s webmasters for the efforts they’ve made to help the channel reverse its fortunes. I’ve interviewed them before and they’re top blokes.
The football, though, sorry. Web for Web’s sake. If it were on t’Interweb AND TV I’d understand as not all of us are in reach of a TV all day long, but watching a grainy feed on a pub telly just doesn’t appeal. I hope it fails as Web-only.