IBC
The world of broadcasting is changing in many ways but one of the old constants that is now in flux is the duration of content. The power of the hour or half hour within the schedule is starting to slip and the worlds of short-form and broadcast are merging.
“Short form video is intrinsically different to the way TV is viewed,” said Will Saunders, creative director of Digital, BBC at IBC2015. “Those who run TV are not literate enough to understand this.”
TV may have the vast majority of views, Saunders noted, but “the worlds of TV and online are merging” evidenced by the migration of BBC3 into a digital only channel.
Joost Galjart, Head of Strategy for Talpa – which devised ‘The Voice’ – described how the producer embeds short form narrative structures into longer episodes and distributes the former clips digitally. Talpa has 2 million YouTube viewers of its ‘The Voice’ channel.
“Short content works when it creates tension loops that keep the viewer engaged,” he said.
Last year, broadcaster Channel 4 launched an online channel dedicated to short formats. It invested £1 million this year in over 40 series from 28 independent producers, and expects to invest the same amount in 2016.
“Shorts are about taking creative risks and investing money in the creative community,” said Owain Rowlands, All 4 Channel Manager. “We debut four new series a month, typically of six episodes, and we publish them as a 'box set' to encourage binge viewing behaviour.”
He advised short form producers to get straight to the point. “On Facebook you've got 3 seconds to entice people to click and watch,” he said. “You need to be personal and direct since viewing on mobile devices is a one to one relationship. You need to incentivise people to share it and you need to think about selling it. That means a title and a thumbnail image that tells an audience what it is about. The most successful shorts have an image you'd put on Instagram and a synopsis you can Tweet.”
Vice Media has amassed a $5 billion valuation in part because of the flexibility of publishing video of different lengths. This is cited by Vice executives as a key reason it has been able to produce the style of reporting characteristic of the outlet.
“People want authenticity,” Kevin Sutcliffe, Head of News Programmes Vice EU, told IBC. “News does not break in a newsroom. News breaks on Twitter.”
Vice News, he explains, is not tied to delivering three minute news packages but has a freedom to format stories depending on its editorial strength. "The good thing about being online is you can run video for as long as you want to, you can run it till you get bored of it, you can run it for an hour," Sutcliffe said. “Vice journalists can come back with documentaries of any length, any size, any shape.”
Sutcliffe is currently wrestling with adapting this free form gonzo-style journalism into a 30 minute daily newscast on HBO under the terms of an expanded deal struck with the satellite and cable network earlier this year.
Broadcasters are exploring content of differing lengths and types of storytelling to engage their audiences and remain relevant. At the same time, online only players like Netflix revel in long form drama. Nor is YouTube wedded to bite-size content. YouTube Red, Google's new subscription service, has commissioned original material as short as six minutes as well as at standard broadcast lengths.
The exclusive content premiering on BBC iPlayer also varies in duration from a series of drama shorts from first-time writers and directors to long-form programmes such as Adam Curtis' 2 hours 17 minutes documentary ‘Bitter Lake’.
Curtis has said he made the film for the online platform because “it isn’t restrained by the rigid formats and schedules of network television.”
But Colin Brown, chairman of the Voice of the Listener and Viewer, warned in The Independent that “there’s a fundamental concern that the BBC – because it’s worried about being left behind – may move too aggressively in this direction, leaving behind the traditional viewer who isn’t accustomed to accessing television in this way.”
However, BBC R&D's experimental approach to media production and delivery, called object-based broadcasting, theoretically permits different versions of the same content depending on how much time a viewer or listener has to consume it.
Its Responsive Radio project is a radio documentary that can adjust itself to fit the time users have available to listen. An audience member can decide how long they want the programme to be and then receive that programme. The back-end is far more complex and requires segmenting the programme into multiple elements (for dialogue and music stems, for example) and links them with a series of narrative pathways such that, when played back at different lengths, the result is still as coherent and polished as the original.
There are considerable technical challenges to this, including the storage and broadcasting of individual objects, and the real-time compositing of objects back into a programme on a variety of devices, but the BBC argue that the most interesting challenge is to help programme makers understand the creative potential of this new approach. It hopes this will “enable programme makers to inform, educate and entertain in ways we can’t yet imagine.”
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