Are Freeview's days numbered?

0:01Hello and welcome to the Media Club. I'm Matt Deegan. In the club today, our Freeviews days numbered. Sam Sharps, chief executive of the Connection Projects, walks us through the government green paper. Also on the show, Fox is acquiring Roku for$22 billion. Journalist Kate Bulkley on what Lachlan Murdoch is really buying. All that, plus the Edinburgh TV Festival becomes the Manchester TV Festival. Sky edges closer to buying ITV channels. and in the audio network media quiz we head into the laboratory that's all happening in this edition of the media club come on in

0:39joining me two club members to talk about the week's biggest media stories making his debut today sam sharp's chief executive of the connection project the cross-sector campaign making sure nobody gets stranded as tv moves online amongst other things sam you've worked at dcms headed up government affairs at apple but most importantly you're now a club member who would you like to bring along with you as your plus one my plus one is sam coates uh the political scene in london is not short of white guys called sam but i'm gonna bring another one in anyway and uh this is in recognition of what i think is just a really really good piece of reporting from manchester the possible imminent likely we don't know arrival of andy burnham in number 10 has set a lot of the media in london sort of pondering what it all means exactly what where he comes from what manchesterism is all about there's been a couple of standout uh pieces of reporting and sam coates's short film which you can find on the sky news website it's just a really really good uh in-depth look at not just the politics of manchester but how it's affected real people so he talks to business people he talks to people on the doorstep constituents who've been affected people who really like any burn and people who are a little bit less convinced and talks about how you translate that to a national level.

1:52I was just really blown away and impressed that this piece of reporting stood out for me. So for this week, Sam will be my plus one. He's very welcome to join. I mean, there is a sort of myopic London focus for people who work in London media. I am guilty. I think we're all a bit guilty sometimes of not realising that there is a world outside of the M25. Yes, I think that's right. Manchester benefits from the Conservative Party conference being held there every couple of years so there's this mass exodus of uh journalists to manchester they see these big skyscrapers and the new restaurants and things something's happening here the uh reporting went into a little bit of the detail of just how much of that was a long-term plan for the city just how much of that was the mayoralty's uh work what that means for the greater manchester area um and this is these are the kind of details that's sort of easy to miss if you're just panning the Westminster base every week.

2:47Well, a welcome addition. And it's also welcome back to Kate Bulkley, a media commentator and journalist, joining us down the line from the East Coast. Who are you welcoming into the club this week, Kate? I think it has to be Russell T Davies. I mean, this show, Tiptoe, which has just, I think, broken all records for Channel 4 in terms of the Sunday night slot. It gets over a million views. It's really difficult television. It's really important television. And as usual, Russell T is doing that, doing the thing he does best, which is talking about real issues that are really important to people.

3:24So I think I think he definitely deserves a place for that show, which is going to go global, I think, as well. A welcome audition and be someone fun to have in the club. I mean, he's someone that sort of rides the good and the bad, controversy, accolades. He's sort of in all of it all the time. He is in all of it all the time. And I love him. I think he's, you know, he writes about stuff that we need to hear. And certainly this one, it's, as I said, a hard watch, but it's really interesting. And I think David Morrissey does a great job as the straight guy trying to work out the queer world. And it's, I mean, it's pretty, it's confronting television, but it's important television.

4:03Have you watched it? I haven't, no. Definitely one for the list. Me too, me too. I mean, Ross T. Davis is a, obviously had all the Doctor Who issues from the past weeks. but there's always something coming along next yeah he's been a fixture in british television for so long now he possibly was the guy behind why don't you yes yeah he made a series of that something that um you know i would have grown up with and uh every year he seems to find something to latch on to that is a bit challenging but like genuinely interesting from a cultural point of view so maybe i should check this one out uh okay in a moment the government wants to switch off your telly eventually that's after the break You've got social dialed in.

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5:31Welcome back to the Media Club. This week, the government published its media green paper, Watch This Space. and with it the first real plan for switching off digital terrestrial television uh sam you're the man in the room on this uh where to begin i suppose um there's been talk about a managed switch off by the end of 2034 or a time limited extension to 2044 uh you guys have welcomed the paper and you're saying 2034 timeline i that is correct so the green paper is this fairly hefty tome actually that covers a lot of ground it's there's a lot of detail in there i think people are still getting their head around some of it there's some really interesting stuff in there on prominence of public service content there's some things on listed events uh media literacy but the thing that's captured a lot of people's attention is this question about the future of dtt the future of freeview uh the government has left an open door here i think it said that there are these two options.

6:32Ministers have said they are minded or that they see the evidence for 2034, but they want to consult and there's a lot of detail that needs to be worked through. We agree there are a lot of factors that will need to be thought through and will need to be actively delivered in order to get to the 2034. But broadly, we think the case is really strong for 2034. There could be a lot of knock on benefits if all of that is delivered properly. I mean, they're not the only people that use the transmitters tv uh companies um i'm in the radio world and have a touch on some of that in my businesses because if tv's on those transmitters like the radio stations and multiplexes that are left on there as well knock on to them too if you haven't if you don't have broadband or ip and you've only can get tv through an aerial is 2034 a bit soon for some of that uh well this was one of the issues that will need to be working through in the consultation and no doubt the radio industry will have its own view on that and they'll want to make all that clear to government i don't think there are many who believe that 2034 will be the end of radio that's not the intention clearly it's a it's a different customer proposition slightly different uh technology uh network and uh but nonetheless there will be a some issues to work through because they share sites you say and if those sites are deactivated for dtt then if not uh adapted or uh shut down altogether then there's a question of uh how all that's paid for but a lot of this needs to be worked through still if dtt free views if reviews off i suppose you can watch tv through the internet and things like freely is sort of there to do a bit of this job over ip so you've got free sat still exists as well and i guess wouldn't be affected by these changes so is the would the message be to consumers that there's still multiple ways that you can get television if this one is perhaps going away yeah 100 is that so even the case for 2044 there is very few people who would make a case that ddt should stay on indefinitely and that's because it needs to recognize consumer habits now just anecdotally you and i i suspect would be pretty similar in the of an evening you wouldn't turn on the television and flip up and down on the channels anymore nor would you look at the epg you'd most likely go to non-demand service first and then we're the london media elite though we well we are but i can tell you my parents who are very much not the london media elite are in a very similar space as well and that what that means is dtt as a proportion of viewing has been going down it's about a third or less than a third now of all viewing there's some exceptions the world cup i suspect we'll see it spike a little bit there's some live event television and things that people still quite like the idea of dtt for but consumer habits are shifting what that means is the economic model around dtt is changing it's becoming more and more difficult to maintain and basically because there are big fixed costs around free view the uh num the cost per household actually experiencing that goes up and up as the viewership goes down it's a lot of money for less and less people kate do you think we should abandon those second third tvs in houses those those free view boxes and and put everyone on the internet?

9:42Well, I think it's a question of you have to, because that's the way the market's moving. As people are getting older, the younger people are not going to be, as you say, having all these funny different boxes in these different rooms. They're doing it on their phone. They're doing it on IP. So you have to move in this direction. It's not really a question of if, it's how fast can we get there. And I'm a great proponent of getting there quicker because YouTube is coming for everybody. You know, they already overtake took ITV. They're going to overtake BBC in terms of share. I think it's at 14 percent now.

10:17BBC is at 19 percent. ITV is at 12 percent. So, you know, they're coming. They're coming. People are watching stuff on social. They're watching stuff on YouTube. We have to switch. There's a question about, yes, you have to get those people that don't have broadband yet onto it. But this will happen. We've been here before. Channel 5 had the same issue when we had to switch out all those boxes. So it can be done. If YouTube's kind of coming for broadcast, shouldn't broadcast have some of their own distribution platforms that they can control? If they give up all of those and jump into the completely two feet into the IP world, doesn't that make them more likely to be attacked?

10:56Well, they have streaming platforms. I mean, ITV has a very strong, they have the hub. And what you're seeing now is with ITV selling its broadcast business to Sky, they're going to make that even stronger. So I think, you know, there's there's a lots of I mean, you could argue that there should be one universal UK streaming platform. That was Kangaroo back in the day that got shot down. Now, I think everyone realizes that was probably the wrong decision. So we've got BBC iPlayer, you know, there they could maybe take on more people. Some people say, well, do we want to work with the BBC? So but everyone has built strong streaming platforms.

11:32They're all going to be on this service. It's not like they're not in the streaming business. is going to help broadcasters, Matt, because they're going to have less money to pay to broadcast all these services, which is expensive, you know, to get this stuff onto DTT and onto broadcast networks. So the idea of transitioning into IP is exactly where they need to be, not only in terms of audience, but in terms of economics. I mean, different countries do it different ways. Obviously, in America, there was very strong cable tv operation historically but you can still get basically your version of freeview tv through the aerial um does anybody do that or is it all cable and ip subscriptions is there anybody watching the world cup on there on uh with a bit of cable hanging out the back of the house yeah yeah no not much anymore cable really uh took over the u.s market and of course now cable is in decline because of course everything is going ip now hence you know a story i think we're going to talk about later with you know fox getting roku i mean you know you have to get into this world you have to be in the streaming world uh that's where that's where it's all happening that's where the advertising is going that's where the viewers are going that's where the subscriptions are going that's where the money is that's where the viewers are sam if um you've got 10 years uh for for this to maybe happen is there anything the broadcasters have to do or that we've got to talk to the public about to sort of get them ready for this oh there's a huge amount yeah and uh this is one of the things we want to talk to government about because the signaling the leadership of government is really really important if you think back to the switch over from analog to digital around 2010 2012 which went way smoother than a lot of people extremely well and i would argue that is in part because once you've set the vision once people realize it's arriving then the tv manufacturers lined up behind it and started marketing the products people started doing things like buying a set-top box for relatives for christmas these things are relatively affordable and this was like quite a nice thing to do or passing on a tv to to relatives and uh in the end the expectation there will be a substantial number of households suddenly plunged into darkness and unable to watch tv didn't really come to pass now this is a fairly complicated project in comparison to that but nonetheless there's there's a lot of things we can do we need to make sure the connectivity is there which means basically completing the broadband build-out which is proceeding at pace and should be ready but nonetheless there's still a job to do there we need to think about affordability there are people for whom broadband is just expensive or they they find um getting the kit in their house a little bit too expensive we need to find probably stronger and better ways to support them.

14:17And then there's the big information campaign and the support structure that you need to put in place so that people know what to expect, know what they need to do. And I'm not naive in thinking you can just replicate the free view process because the information environment's changed, the way people get the news has changed, all of this. But nonetheless, I think some of the examples are there that we can borrow from. And if we take the right steps now, I think we can get to 2034 in really good shape. Well, moving on, and Kate's mentioned it, Fox is buying Roku in a deal worth around$22 billion.

14:50Kate, where to begin? $160 a share cash in stock. Roku reaches 100 million streaming households. So we talked about this on the show a couple of weeks ago. A lot of people have Roku sort of a bit like an Apple TV box, like it's their route to kind of get IP television. For news, it means that Fox's Sports and News Plus, The free ad supported 2B is all sort of similar and will maybe sit on there. Good deal. Good deal for the Murdochs. Well, it's an interesting deal that the Murdochs have done. The Murdochs tend to not pay a lot of money for big acquisitions. That's not one of the things that they do traditionally.

15:32But Lachlan is obviously, Lachlan Murdoch has obviously seen this as kind of a have to do it. He's looking at the media environment and saying it's got to be about scale. It's got to be in you've got to be into streaming in a big way. And Tubi was an interesting buy, but it doesn't have the scale that Roku does. You mentioned the 100 million subscribers on Roku. They have first party data that obviously helps with advertising. They have direct relationship with consumers. That's obviously really key in this world that we're moving into now where you have to directly talk to subscribers and users, not sort of via some kind of, you know, other kind of tracking.

16:09So that's all good. I think Fox is also thinking, they definitely overpaid in my view, and I think that's why their stock has fallen. They're taking on$8 billion in new debt. That's going to inhibit maybe their ability to buy more content, which of course is the other thing you need. You not only need distribution, you need content, you need to be vertically integrated. That's another catchphrase that we're all using. So is it a good deal for Fox? Well, it was expensive. The market doesn't like it. But I think it's inevitable that they had to do something. And Roku is a very interesting player to buy.

16:45I think some of the questions that we're going to have to answer is, if you are a distributor on Roku, because they have a lot of different players on that platform, and are you going to suddenly want to be working on a Fox platform? I mean, that's a direct competitor to a lot of these people. So that's going to be interesting how that's going to work out. What are the terms and conditions? How much data will other providers be willing to share with the now Fox owner as opposed to the more neutral Switzerland Roku owner? So I think that's going to be an interesting issue. But I think they had to do it.

17:20It's the fractured landscape out there. This is a way to make sure that they can keep their place in the in the party i mean fox interesting take up take on on this business so historically they own tv guide was sort of the route to television the paper edition and now they've sort of got the digital version uh of that for for lots of households i mean being about it yeah uh being like a platformer owner that's a good uh sort of inserting yourself uh in between the content and the consumer, that's a good place to be? Well, yeah. I mean, it's like the BBC iPlayer. It's like a destination. You know, Roku is the way a lot of people get to their apps, all the various apps that they may be out there.

18:07It's not, in a way, Roku has simplified the viewing experience for a lot of users in the same way that Sky in the UK has tried to simplify the viewing experience for a lot of users. So it's like a Roku-like service where you go in and you can find all those different apps, but you don't have to go in and go out. You don't have to go out to get to an app and then come back in to the Sky environment. It's the same with Roku. You don't have to go in and go out. It's all there. So you go into Roku and you see all your apps. You see your live streaming services. You see the Roku channel, which is another live streaming service.

18:39And so one would assume that Fox will lean into that and leverage that for their own channels and basically increase their, hopefully their presence in the world, which is what they're doing this for. yeah i'm sure there'll be some prominence for fox news and fox nation and tubi which is their sort of other streaming streaming service that they have sam i saw some commentary that as kate was saying you know they paid at the sort of top of the game for it and that maybe roku had sort of peaked uh i mean it's a complex business there's a lot of people who want access to those consumers you have an apple tv you have other services um do you think it's a sort of reinvention of their business do they want to them going for broadcast again after selling a lot of their tv assets previously i think it's part of the bigger strategic challenge that faces huge amounts of broadcasters now including our psbs at home part of the green paper as i say is about the prominence the recognition for public service content on various different platforms and it's a recognition that the viewing experience is more fractured the more people who want not control exactly but want ownership of that viewer and understanding of their data and ability to monetize their activities and that is a very different world than we had in the past with linear channels all of the psbs are facing challenges around this it might be that there's regulatory intervention in the future to help govern some of this and you can justify that on the basis of access to news or national importance or identity or misinformation there's lots of different arguments around all this but ultimately it's also a commercial challenge and it's for the commercial broadcasters and it's something they're having to come to terms with what's quite interesting talking to them is uh there are so many different directions this is going in there's the manufacturers of the sets themselves like lg and samsung and what prominence you can find uh for content on there and uh what control the broadcasters have over how some of that appears you've got the other platforms classically sky you've got the equivalent of apple tv you say and the equivalence of roku and all of these things are are shifting and people are having to experiment and take gambles and try to come to some kind of compromise all the time and this is the world we're now living yeah i mean so everyone's kind of backing all sides so you know you can distribute your service on um your own streaming service you then pop up on freely you pop up on sky pop on apple tv some people working together on things itv and amazon swapping shows or all of that stuff um is this that we're all happy jolly come by our working together is it no one's really sure who's going to be the winner place a load of different bets i mean if in doubt i'd always back nobody knows anything and say i agree with you on that fundamentally everybody's trying a lot of different things because there are a lot of challenges and the world is more complex than it used to be um so ultimately it's difficult to predict exactly where some of this comes out from a policy point of view i can completely understand why dcms feel they need to take a little bit of a look at what the regulatory structure should be around some of this but first and foremost there are a lot of commercial decisions and um kind of partnership decisions that can just happen outside that and people are just going to have to try some things Kate, just quickly, I saw this week that Elizabeth Warren, the Democrat senator, said that some of these media mergers, there was this acquisition, but things like the Paramount merger might be unpicked when Trump leaves office.

22:16Media companies just don't know what to do, do they? Do they bow down to the president? Do they try and sort out the Democrats who might come in next or might take control of the House? Is it tough being a media owner in the US? It's tough being a media owner with an independent news division in the U.S. right now. Yes, I would say that is a yes. I mean, we're seeing people being pushed off air. We're seeing, I mean, 60 Minutes has lost, I think it's three now, big reporters, journalists, because they were asked the wrong questions and Mr. Trump didn't like it. So it's very difficult. I think Elizabeth Warren obviously is fairly left.

22:59Her idea is that one of the reasons why there's been there's so little regulation and everything's being allowed is because, of course, Mr. Trump believes the market will deliver. Will some of these things get unpicked afterwards? Oh, my goodness. That will be that would be a hard one because they're going to start moving in. You know, everyone's moving to restructure. Once you get the go ahead, you know, you start firing people, you start realigning, you do cost analysis. So how could you unpick it? I don't know. that's a that's a tough one but it is definitely difficult to be a media owner with an independent news service right now okay just before the break after 50 years the edinburgh tv festival is leaving edinburgh from 2027 it's going to be held in greater manchester uh kate the official reasons affordability uh those prices in edinburgh it's hard to get somewhere to stay and it's not cheap um is that the whole story or do you think there's any other reason they're heading down south It's the Andy Berman effect, don't you think?

23:57Come on. He's going to be the next prime minister. They knew. They knew in advance. Well, certainly he was one of the people, I think, pushing it. I mean, he was obviously pushing Manchester. And I think Newcastle also bid for this and didn't get there. So, I mean, you know, who knows? I mean, yes, there is an affordability question. Does it matter where it is? I think the one thing I would say and that I've seen some of the content makers say is that having it in Edinburgh when the fringe is going on is is cool because there's a certain amount of synergy. I mean, somebody said, oh, you know, Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Fleabag would never have been discovered if the Edinburgh Television Festival hadn't been going on when she was doing her fringe show, Fleabag, right back in the day.

24:44Yes. No. Who knows? Obviously, there's some shows that are made in Manchester, so maybe they'll get a different kind of leg up. So, you know, it's in some ways it's sad because obviously we all love going to Edinburgh. Scotland is a very important part of the media scene. And will this make it a lesser important part of the media scene? I don't know. But Manchester is also a growing place. And hey, if they got a better deal and it's going to be cheaper to get a hotel room, maybe that makes sense. I mean, trying to make it more affordable, particularly in the TV market where difficult for freelancers, terrible time they're having.

25:16They've got to they've got to try and restructure how it's paid for. yeah i think that's right i mean i think there was some suggestion that maybe london might possibly be in the running and that was ruled out fairly quickly um and i think i agree with kate that the political center of gravity appears to have moved to manchester all of a sudden it could have been this comes this decision was in the works for some time before uh andy buddh came back into parliament but nonetheless this feels pretty fortuitous uh sort of interesting to me as a former official at the department of culture media and sport that we've never had a secretary of state from that department who's gone into number 10 a couple of them have tried and fallen short not quite made it and annie burnham's not there yet but he might be soon so somebody who's both uh engaged in the sector because of the manchester hub and you know um the bbc and the studio activity up there but also knows the sector from one of his previous briefs is kind of an interesting proposition for um my members who are in the broadcasting sector and uh maybe this decision by the edinburgh festival um is part of a little trend that could be pretty fortuitous yes okay when we return the publishers you've worked out how to make ai pay see you in a sec

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28:55Welcome back. Here's a few things we've been talking about in the club this week. At Can Lions, publishers showed up with a new wheeze, start making money from AI. Time has built an invisible version of its website, according to Press Gazette, just for AI crawlers. On the yachts, the stat during the round is that 84 % of AI citations now come from publishers. Piers Morgan's Uncensored has raised$27 million to expand from a single YouTube channel into a full network, valuing the business at$145 million. Among the backers, Elizabeth Murdoch, daughter of Rupert. It comes just a month after her brother James bought Vox and New York Magazine.

29:34And Border Media, owned by UK residents Ricky Lee and Hannah Coletta, has reacquired a station in upstate New York. The couple became the first European owners of an American radio station back in 2018. And now they're taking WLGR back on. Links to all of our stories are available on our sub stack. Just check it out at themediaclub.com. You can sign up there for free, themediaclub.com. Sam and Kate are still with me. Sky and ITV agree terms. A news breaking yesterday by Reuters suggested that terms have been agreed between Sky and ITV. This is Sky's acquisition of ITV's channeled business. Kate, what details have emerged?

30:17Well, I guess we knew that something was happening. This has been in the works, I think, since last November is when we first started reporting on it, at least. This, you know, Carolyn McCall is in an interesting position as the head of ITV. She is a publicly listed company. She has seen her company being, you know, rocked and rolled by, you know, well, linear TV is falling. ITV Studios is doing really well. And it's like a disconnect between the two businesses. They're almost like two separate, well, they are two separate businesses. And one is in decline structurally, and one is, you know, doing well, and hopefully will do better if it's freed up, let's say, from one might call it the anchor of the M &E business, which is the media and entertainment business.

31:02It is that business, if I could just say, is, and she would say this, is very strong, and it is very strong right now, but it's definitely in decline. It's cash generative at the moment. You know, it's, but there's a structural change, as we've been saying in this whole, in this whole podcast about what's going on in the business. And even Carolyn herself at the latest Enders Conference made an interesting comment. She said, linear is now a segment of the advertising market against online video and digital advertising. It's an important segment, but it's a segment. So clearly her idea of offloading this business to somebody else is a good one for her.

31:40So, you know, it makes sense for ITV. I think great sense for ITV. What will Sky do with it? That will be interesting. You know, Sky is an interesting group. They are a distribution company, basically leaned into, you know, how to get the subscribers to sign up for things this is going to move them into a slightly different place and we'll see what they can do with it but it's a great deal I think for ITV. I mean there was lots of chats about who would buy ITV's production business I think everyone was a little bit surprised when this broke at the end of last year I think that someone was after their channel side I did notice though that as part of the deal Sky Staking love productions they're the people behind the piano and the great British Bake Off would go to ITV Studios, which should be quite interesting.

32:31Yeah, I actually say when I when I saw that I was a little bit surprised. But then I remembered that they had done that deal way back when with that particular production company. So that's interesting, too. How is Sky looking at its production assets going forward? Whereas when When Dana came in, who's the new, not new, but she's been the CEO for a while of Sky, she very much was into technology, how to shift to IP, how to get away from the satellite, because, you know, it was a dish business for a long time. And now it's basically an IP delivery business. She very much leaned into trying to make, as I said before, kind of a Roku-like environment where you go in and you're in the Sky environment.

33:14So all that has been where she's been heading. and the Sky Studios business was kind of going on over here, but it was not, I would say, they weren't leaning into it big time. They do a couple of tentpole operations that sort of like an HBO type model, you know, a couple of really good shows that help bring people in, but it's not the kind of scale that you would have at ITV Studios or Channel 4 or anything like that. So, but I think that, again, they're trying to figure out what it is they're going to be doing and one they are a distribution company so they i guess they feel they can use these assets uh to move them forward i mean sam this is a deal that's got to get past the regulators as well i just was sort of thinking back because i think sky at some point owned like it took a a surprising 20 share of itv and everyone went mad and uh they sort of came out of it when they could and now the sort of the view is like yeah it probably happened it won't be a won't be a big issue the world's changed yes i mean i think there's still a job to do for the competition markets authority and probably ofcom as well uh you undoubtedly won't get a single word out of them as to their intentions even to the process they're likely to follow but clearly i think there will be some kind of process there um it's possible to take a fairly breezy view of these things and say well actually the world moved on uh these things don't quite matter so much but equally there is a you know a legislative requirement to apply certain rules and i've got no personal inside track as to how either of those regulators think about them but we've already heard project kangaroo mentioned as you say there's been other cases in the past it is possible in at a snapshot of time to take an interpretation of what a market looks like what consumers need what what sort of power you have uh in the market that within a few years looks slightly outdated or extremely outdated because of the wider environments and everything all the habits that are changing and all the different competitors that exist out there so it's quite a difficult task for the regulators i'm sure you know the companies will end up engaging with them and who knows what we'll get to exactly but um as you say uh a deal of this sort might have seemed completely unthinkable 10 years ago it certainly doesn't have yeah um kate i was sort of thinking there'd be like some dude at comcast that when when they bought sky and they realized they had to commit to sort of eight to ten years of sky news and and funding that and that same dude's probably looking this going they've got a local news division and a national news and we've probably got to keep that going as well um the new the news element's interesting itv only own 40 i think of itn news uh it provides obviously services for them for channel four for five there's then their local operation too um are there some question marks about the future of of itn and all this yeah i think i think that's one of the rub points uh that the regulators have to look at you know sky news itn news should they be together or should the significant proportion of them be together owned by comcast or sky um i think you could argue both ways uh i think in some ways it should be independent.

36:27And so maybe they'll have to put that out there, I don't know, offload that bit, or put some ring fencing around it like they did with Sky News. You know, Sky News is highly regulated already. So it's not like they don't understand the regulatory environment for news in the UK. It's not like it's a, you know, it's not like it's a Fox News. So I think that that could be a rub point. But I think that there are ways to get around it. And certainly news is really, really important. And obviously, it's going to be increasingly important as we talk about, well, democracy and what people know and what people should be seeing or should have access to easily.

37:07And that gets back to what we talked about in the beginning with the green paper, the prominence issue. It's really important. It's not just the DTT turnoff. It's prominence and where everything will be prominent and how prominent will it be and how easy will it be to find news that comes from let us say public service media as opposed to from commercial organizations just just finally on on the green paper and we bring it all back to the beginning the bit i found the most interesting was the um the public media element in there it was sort of in one hand the most wishy-washy because it was just wouldn't it be nice if we sort of funded public media where kind of ever it was or um you know that should be like let a thousand flowers bloom um no description of how they would pay for it and sort of they were saying they'd pay for it with prominence like if you committed to making good worthy public service programming then that would on youtube or in other places uh it would be put in front of people which i thought was a very interesting take i mean is that the modern take everything is about basically exposure uh well what else is that other than viewers i suppose is one way of looking at it we've been through various cycles with the public service broadcasters and sorry to hark on about the glory days of andy burn and that's dcms but at the time that one of the really really pressing questions for him was how you ensured a viable commercial public service broadcasting um environment and there was all sorts of talk about top slicing the license fee or maybe taking bbc worldwide and taking some of its money and giving it to channel 4 on itv and this was considered and then never public service publisher yes i think that might be one of the other buzzwords i remember that and this and this eventually went away and the conservative government or the coalition government that came in didn't want to touch it and uh we got to you know a reasonably sustainable outcome later on so i'd always be a little bit suspicious of government ministers who seize on the business model of how a commercial organization is going to work i don't think that's a massive recipe for success.

39:17But I think what they are alive to is the thing that commercial broadcasters bring to them, which is there is a danger of what they would see as democratically and nationally important content going unnoticed by viewers in a way that it wouldn't have been in the past. And the rules sort of need to respond to reflect that. As a consequence of that, that allows the broadcasters to continue to invest in content. And that's the deal that I think everyone's interested in getting to okay just enough time for the audio network media quiz

39:52three media stories connected by one theme and then shoehorned into the format of an existing media property this week it's media lab a renegade scientist has been locked in a lab combining elements that were never meant to be combined your job is to deduce the real world media story from each foolhardy experiment. And once again, Alex Audio Network is taking that sinister slightly to CBBC brief from producer Matt and conjured up a playlist to score today's game. Right, it's the best of three so you buzz in with your names if you know the story. So Kate, you will say Kate. And Sam you'll say. Sam.

40:31Let's play Media Lab. Into the beaker goes a century-old institution. On top of it, a splash of the world's largest video platform. The scientist stirs and the mixture starts speaking to strangers in faraway lands. Yes, Kate. Isn't this the BBC going to test some kind of news channel on YouTube that's going to go outside of the UK? In other words, it's a different kind of... I guess it's a way to do BBC World Service, but on YouTube. Yeah, the BBC's testing a live stream of its rolling news channel on YouTube in select countries outside of the UK. There's a lot of news channels around the world.

41:09BBC News Channel, as it exists at the moment, is in lots of places, often in a sort of subscription package with platforms. Are they right to go straight to the consumer? Well, I think that they're going where the audience is. I mean, it goes back to what we were talking about before. You know, YouTube is a huge force globally and in the UK. And if you want to get viewership, you have to be on YouTube. uh okay question number two three rivals are dissolved into a single solution a broadcaster owned by the state a broadcaster funded by ads and a broadcaster owned by an american giant the scientist bottles them together and hands the flask to the little guy who can now buy a splash a splash of all three in minutes what's the compound uh advertising i don't know uh what's that sorry okay sorry kate i meant to say yes it's something about advertising it's a it's i think it's a way to put different advertising together in some kind of a um a campaign you know yeah so this is this is i'll let you out your misery uh universal ads uh has launched in the uk so this is about comcast comcast self-serve platform let small businesses buy tv advertising across channel 4 itv and sky from a single interface uh making telly so the press release says and is easy to buy as social um kind of interesting that comcast are the people behind it and they've sort of bought together inventory from other folks yeah sure i think there's a kind of folk memory of going to the cinema and seeing your local indian restaurant with a sort of badly lit ad for their services and um there's no like in today's world that could be done a lot more professionally a lot slicker and there's absolutely no reason particularly given the amount of targeting you can now do that there shouldn't be more scope and more experimentation around some of that i mean also kate for tv broadcasters who are kind of ip tv broadcasters um if you've got the spare inventory making it available to as many people as possible as an important part of your business model going forward?

43:17Oh, definitely. I mean, I think all the people in the broadcast media space, you know, Kelly Williams is the one I always think of first, because he's the managing director of commercial ITV, and he's been in this game for a long time. And he says, you know, getting those kind of ads in what he calls a trusted premium TV environment, right, is what he wants to do. So it's a way to make that happen more easily for him as opposed to you know having to help them make an ad or figure out you know what they're how as you say how to light it you know what they're going to say i mean this is just an easier way for him to sell inventory uh more easily and and more cheaply okay question number three the final experiment is highly volatile the scientist takes one notorious specimen removes it from its natural habitat at great expense and tries to keep it alive online instead sam yes is this the slightly alarming australian chap who had a big blow up on air and has been locked in court with his former employers ever since yes that's right so we've mentioned on the show before this is kyle sandalands of kyle and jackie o fame uh he dropped his 85 million dollar uh lawsuit uh to take a 12 million dollar payoff um he also announced a new online show behind a paywall um kate what's fascinating about the deal i don't know if you saw this is the arn the company that he was in a legal battle with are going to be promoting the new show and taking a share in it i mean this is the perfect sort of media deal take your your previous main star then mortal enemy and then hop back in bed with him right and what do you think they're thinking about, Matt?

44:59I think they're thinking about how to make more money and get more audience. I don't know. What do you think? I mean, now he's a cause to put it back on television. I don't know. Well, I think that makes Kate, you our winner today. As a special prize, you get to turn this into an advert that you can put on the new Comcast system for a small quality price. Matt, I'll send you some rushes. Also, thanks to Alex Audio Network for supplying today's music. Remember, Audio Network can do that for you as well. Just head to audionetwork.com dot com uh there's a link in the show notes as well uh so sam where can people keep up with you and the project uh you can find us at connectionproject.co.uk that's our website uh we'll be coming out with a report later this year with some further thinking and recommendations and ideas about how to progress all of our ideas across digital participation partly about tv but partly about lots of other issues as well uh you can find me on linkedin i have a fairly distinctive name and very easy to find and more than happy to talk to people who are interested in the project great and kate how can people keep up with you and what you're doing uh you can also find me on linkedin and i'm a commentator for broadcast magazine uh excellent uh thank you to you both also thank you to you for listening and watching my name is matt deegan the producer was matt hill it was a rethink audio production with video support from podcast discovery i'll see you next week

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