Reading Doc Searls’ entry on how American TV is changing, I think about my impressions about how slow, hide bound and expensive American TV networks appear compared to the UK networks. UK television is caught between the need to be very cheap (small country, higher costs) and the requirement to keep up some semblance of quality (big, well-funded BBC with high values). Now add to that a recent market-liberalisation-through-technology: Brits get dozens of channels via broadcast, digital satellite (23%) or digital terrestrial (6%), digital cable (8%), or analogue cable (7%). Forty percent of British TVs have some kind of interactivity feature, 80% of them have Teletext. (Stats grabbed from the ITC
Setting up a TV channel in Britain is surprisingly cheap: at the most basic level, you just pay for a satellite transponder, which can be less than a million quid. Of course, turning a profit in that multi-channel market isn’t easy, but the low barriers to entry and fierce competition does encourage innovation. Well, the innovation that leads to Millionaire, Robot Wars, and dozens of below-the-radar cheap-and-cheerful throw away shows, anyway. Your typical market competition, in other words. The BBC, curiously, doesn’t rise above this bear pit: much to the dismay of some its more patrician elements, it wades on in, fists flying, grabbing for audience share in an attempt to justify its license fee.
I don’t think one system is particularly better than the other. I am, however, surprised how it turns out. It seems to me that the slow-moving, top-heavy, seasons-and-repeats American model leads to the high production values, low risk, staid and cumbrous epics that you’d expect from a public service broadcaster. By contrast, the British market benefits from competing with the BBC, producing exactly the sort of bright, popular scrappy cheap tat that a more liberalised market is supposed to provide.
Doc’s piece is about how Reality TV is changing the American model – encouraging them to dump the expensive season and repeats model for a more lively, staggered run, with cheaper shows. I’m not surprised that a lot of those reality shows were forged in the furnace of the UK market.