One of Futurescape’s key roles in the television and new media industries is as a thought leader for broadcasters, indies, advertisers and start-ups.
The last 15 years for us has been all about researching, identifying and describing major creative and commercial opportunities. We publish our findings as reports and produce prototypes to demonstrate how those opportunities can actually be realised.
This typically puts us at least a year ahead of public discussion and analysis of where TV and the Internet are headed, so it’s always interesting for us to see the point at which trends that we’ve anticipated break out into the open.
A striking example came at NATPE 2010.
This was the venue which Elisabeth Murdoch, CEO of international TV production company Shine, chose for a keynote speech urging the television industry to embrace social media as a way to reconnect and co-create with their audiences.
Shine has developed a number of multiplatform formats (such as weight loss show The Biggest Loser) and Murdoch has brought in Joanna Shields to launch a new company within the Shine group to focus on social media and TV. Shields was previously a senior executive at teen social network Bebo and championed its commissioning of interactive Web TV shows such as Sofia’s Diary.
So how does Murdoch’s speech compare with the paradigm that we had already set out in our 2009 WeVision report, from a detailed analysis of 50 of the world’s leading social TV shows?
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Elisabeth Murdoch, CEO Shine, speaking at NATPE Jan 2010 |
Futurescape’s WeVision paradigm, May 2009 |
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Audiences are craving more engagement worldwide... Social networks are the foundation upon which we can build new entertainment business models. |
We showed the engagement and business models in action in the WeVision report. WeVision productions – programming that embraces social media – address very specific communities that can be matched with brands and engaged via product integration. Advertising becomes relevant again. |
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I also believe that experiential media is a very potent vaccine against piracy. If our content is irreducible to a file format because it’s simply too multi-dimensional—the less chance you have of being ripped off. |
A key finding of the report is that it is impossible to copy or pirate an interactive, multidimensional experience. The entertainment value of the social TV shows profiled in WeVision is rooted in social interactivity, amongst community members or between fans and producers. |
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Right now we are at a very exciting moment, the fusion of broadcasting and social mediums. It is a merger where the viewer becomes our co-creator. |
We described how the fusion is already manifesting itself. A particularly innovative example of co-creation is what we call the real-time format, an emerging form of online production that is very different from broadcast television. |
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If we embrace social mediums, we reinvent our companies, we rethink our attitudes, and we rethink our creativity, we are at the start of something exciting, a model that can lead to a new kind of commerce which avoids the free nonsense, and provides value to our creative industry. |
Futurescape’s WeVision model is a four-step process for reinventing online video content, after having your compelling idea:
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In researching and publishing WeVision, our aim is to provide our readers with the big picture of how the Internet is fundamentally transforming television and how they and their companies can respond by:
- Building a digital strategy for effective interactive projects
- Understanding content, interactivity and engagement architecture for social TV
- Accessing examples of successful Web show sponsorship
We are at the start of an exciting and innovative era in television – WeVision is an essential business tool for reinventing media companies, pioneering new entertainment business models and conceptualising, commissioning, sponsoring and producing social TV.
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