Digital Childhood and the lessons of history

There's been significant coverage in the last week or so concerning young people, their exposure to inappropriate imagery in the media, their treatment by the media, and the recording of them covertly by a school authority.

It struck me, as often it does, that there are patterns of behaviour which taken together might point towards shifts in the relationship between audience and institution, between the producer/user and the content aggregator and distributor. The traditional lines of production and reception are blurring and evolving - maybe that's why we're seeing a prevalence of stories expressing concern, confusion and outrage.

Let's begin with the study. A Home Office report, led by Dr Linda Papadopoulos, claimed this week that children were being mentally affected by viewing an excess of sexually explicit material in the media. Amongst other recommendation the report suggests having parental blocks switched on as the default on mobile phones, computers and games consoles. It also suggests putting an age limit for so called Lads' mags.

The report claims there's a clear link between youngster viewing sexually explicit material and the rise of violence towards females. There's a host of other recommendations and it'll be interesting to see if an incoming Conservative government, or re-elected Labour administration, is bold enough to tackle head-on the challenge of web data access, in order to protect the young.

Of course, claiming that the young of today are worse behaved than previous generations is nothing new. Take this quotation for example:

'The Children now love luxury; they have bad manner, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up food at the table, cross their legs, and terrorize their teachers.'

That was Socrates, two thousand years ago, and so it's possible to see how critics on both sides of the argument might claim either that the Greeks' theory of moral decline is merely accelerating, thanks to the Web et al; or conversely, that since each generation thinks subsequent ones are worse behaved than it was, there's little to worry about.

However, other developments in the last seven days point to something more pernicious creeping into the zeitgeist. Three Google executives received six-month suspended sentences in Italy, following the uploading in that country to YouTube of footage showing an autistic boy being bullied. This raises fundamental questions about whether the Web is a free domain for content exchange, or a place that should be monitored and filtered at source. Trying to 'police' and censor content is likely to prove an impossible task, given the sheer scales of economy the Web creates. But the Italian case does raise questions about responsibility and accountability. We might be living in an age of unfettered access to content of every hue, but can legislation restore a sense of morality and balance into the lives of the young? This is where parents and teachers face the mounting challenge of modelling good online behaviour, and using dialogue with common sense to help young people make the right decisions for themselves.

Equally terrifying and so wrong on every level, was news that an American school had deployed laptops to students, then used the integrated webcams to spy on students. This included allegedly watching them undress and other private activities. Although the education authority is claiming the activation was used only to locate lost laptops, the fact this remote access wasn't detailed in the contracts signed by parents shows a disregard for ways in which technology can be abused; or at least, seen to be abused. Currently there is one lawsuit pending, in which a male student was allegedly seen acting 'improperly' at home - the evidence was a screen grab from his school laptop's webcam. In this case, the breach of trust between educational institution and student points to a wider issue about digital identity, safety and representation. Although this may seem an extreme case, nonetheless it highlights the dangers in using technology to enhance the learning experience positively.

And so, to end with something uplifting. I found this fantastic video of American childrens' TV host, Mister Rogers. I came across the following blog post by Karl Staib, in which he talks about the importance of trust in business relationships. His role model of the caring interlocutor is Mister Rogers, who in 1969 managed to persuade a Congressional hearing, looking to cut public spending on educational TV programming, to have a change of heart. Listening to Mister Rogers' submission is a reminder of the need for passion, honesty and clearly communicated core values; if the lives of children are to be enriched, happy, creative and fruitful.

The vide clip lasts just under seven minutes.

Do make time to watch it.

Visual Language and its power to communicate

Bronwyn van der Merwe has written an amazing blog post at the BBC, detailing the corporation's detailed plans for re-designing the visual language it uses across all areas of its online presence.

It provides a first rate insight into the importance of design in communication, and the need for media institutions to build consistency and ease of use into the core of their practice. It's an essential undertaking if audiences are to recognise and engage effectively with media companies and their content. It's a long post indeed, but very well worth the effort of reading and looking at in detail.

An Age of Personalised Content and Media Collaboration

news.bbc.co.uk

The news that the outstandingly successful BBC iPlayer will be launched on Nintendo's Wii console is proof, if proof were needed, that the relationship between media institutions is changing dramatically in a web-driven world.

Fundamentally, commercial alliances and content sharing with acknowledgement are the way forward. As we move to an age where personalised information will find you, consumers are becoming less brand loyal and more content focused. Nicholas Negroponte made this observation back in 1996, but it's taken more than a decade for the mass market and appropriate technology to play catch up with the theory.

For producers of media content this means that cross-platform co-operation and content fertilization will be key drivers to economic success. The power of Twitter to enable disparate networks to rapidly share links to relevant information, is the most striking example this year of how consumers want to find what they want, and find what they didn't know they'd like.

The age of content protected walled gardens, with media institutions battling to keep audiences within their reach for as long as possible, is over. And that's why claims that Rupert Murdoch may try to limit Google searches for paid-for content coming out of his News International stable ultimately will be floored.

It's not just content that's King. It's the consumer. And the sooner media institutions embrace that idea and think about reach and spread, rather than control and restraint, the sooner they'll find new and profitable business models appearing.

When Politics, Media and Business collide

I heard a fascinating interview with Lord Mandelson, the British Government's Business Secretary this morning, on Radio 4's Today programme.

In the interview Lord Mandelson claimed the Sun newspaper, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News International, is collaborating with the Conservative party to undermine the incumbent Labour Party administration. In return, he suggested, News International had promised some sort of kickback should the Conservatives win the election.

Lord Mandelson also claimed that coverage of anti-government stories in the Sun would be covered on TV by Sky News, also part of the Murdoch stable. Then, perhaps bizarrely, he claimed this would force the BBC to cover biased stories, which in turn would threaten its impartiality.

It was a remarkable allegation for a senior politician to make, and there's more coverage of this and subsequent comments Lord Mandelson made in an article from The Guardian Online. You can read more here.

As we get closer to a general election in the UK, the rate at which mud is slung is bound to increase. Today's salvo is interesting because it's a timely reminder that despite falling circulation figures and savage cuts, the power of the printed word still has clout and can't be discounted.

Something old, something new - Walkman V iPod

BBC NEWS | Magazine | Giving up my iPod for a Walkman

news.bbc.co.uk

I just read this great story on the BBC, in which a 13 year old is given an old fashioned cassette-based Walkman to use for a week.

Terrifyingly, it's been 30 years since the first Walkman was released by Sony, changing the landscape of personal and portable music for ever.

The article is well written and entertaining. It'll make some of you feel distinctly nostalgic.

Read more here.

Where reality gets in the way

So, let me begin with an apology.

This last month or so has been exam time for me, when students get ready to flee the nest by sitting their final year secondary school exams and move on to university, or in the case of my year 12s, get the first part of their A levels sorted, ready to move into their final year.

What this means is that I get overloaded with coursework portfolios and the attendant administration that accompanies them. Allowing for revisions I estimate I read and marked over 100,000 words. I've also had the joys of assessing Year 12 work that's now submitte in the form of blogs and DVDs with extras. Managing all that data has been unexpectedly complicated, in terms of tracking and collating information. We'd thought paperless would be swifter, but making the adjustment has been trickier than we'd anticipated; which goes to show that deploying new technology in learning environments never progresses as you imagined it might.

In amongst all of that I also took 30 eleven year olds to Italy for a week on a Classics tour. Using a Samsung NC10 laptop and a nifty mobile broadband USB stick from 3 Mobile I kept a daily blog. I managed to blog from within the Colosseum and the top of Mt Vesuvius. Interestingly, this year the parents wrote back to me, leaving messages for their kids and questions about where we were. 

In that time we've had Lord Carter's Digital Britain report, looking at ways to expand digital take up in the UK, and suggesting that possibly the BBC should be top-sliced and share its licence fee with commercial competitors, in order to maintain regional news, for example. Not surprisingly, the BBC responded negatively to the suggestion, as did the Liberal Democrats, who struck a chord for all who believe in an independent public service broadcaster. At the same time the Corporation has disclosed the size of its senior staff's salaries and their expense claims. All I can say is that there seems to be a lot of people claiming over £200,000 a year, which is surprising for what is effectively a public sector employer. 

Elsewhere in the world Iran has tried free speech and Twitter was there to keep the lines of communication open. The usual rules apply - be wary of the unfiltered and unverifiable information that Twitter can spew out. Nonetheless, it still makes for fascinating reading. 

Meanwhile, the Head of the BPI, the British music industry body has said Napster should have been engaged with, rather than taken to court. It's a good example of new tech and alternative practices being feared because they were unknown. Lots of similar attitudes exist within education, with staff fearing what hasn't been explained properly.

And finally, the tragic and premature death of Michael Jackson at 50 saw the internet grind to a halt, and BBC soap East Enders show speed and agility when it rapidly added a scene that included reference to this major cultural event, ready for broadcast on Friday night.

All in all it's been a busy six weeks and I've been busy too working on plans for our school's VLE, testing new kit (digital SLR upgrade, audio recording kit, HD camcorders that record to 16gig SD cards) and a whole lot more.

Now that the students have finished I hope to get back to writing and sharing.

All the best, 

Sacha

Media speculation, social networking, political agendas

There's been rather a lot of hot air spewed into the ether recently about the risks of using social networking sites and the harm it can do to students.

As I'm in the middle of marking A level coursework and preparing my Media students for their exams I've watched but not commented so far, as I wanted time to make a considered response.

Thankfully, the excellent Bill Thompson has done it for me, writing on the BBC website.

His informative and factual report analyses the data that's been used by the Press to suggest that Facebook use can result in lower grades. The article makes for fascinating reading, not least because it highlights the degree to which media outlets can become quickly hostile to communication methods that threaten existing and future audiences.

Stephen Fry on Twitter

A nice video post from Stephen Fry about why he likes using the micro blogging service Twitter. For those of us involved in education his final comment, about using Twitter as an interactive source of information, is perhaps the most interesting, in terms of using Twitter within a learning context.

Watch the video, provided by the BBC, here.

Colour blind to radical change

BBC - EastEnders - Pictures - Galleries

www.bbc.co.uk

Somehow I missed the press coverage of the fact that on Tuesday night BBC1 played its first ever episode of the long running hit soap opera, East Enders, with an entirely black cast. 

23 years is a long time to wait for such an event, thus explaining the media news coverage.

Anyway, I watched the show, munched my dinner, and the only thought that crossed my mind was that it was another sparkling episode, with good acting, a strong narrative, and important moral issues raised. Of course, the nature of soaps means this doesn't happen all the time, but when it does, the BBC scriptwriters tend to get it just right.

The drama centred round collective history, the early race riots in Notting Hill in 1958, how that led to the creation of the now world-famous August Carnival, issues of active and passive resistance, and the need to know one's roots. Family secrets was another narrative motif that drove the storyline throughout the episode.

I found myself reflecting on the time, many years ago, when I worked as a radio reporter, and went to interview one of the early organisers of London's Notting Hill Carnival (whose name, shamefully, I cannot recall). I was honoured to be invited into the family home, accompany a range of cousins, arts, uncles, nephews and nieces, out onto the streets for the day. I got to ride on one of the famous floats, and left late in the evening with a strong sense of community spirit. 

One of the slogans of the early Carnival events was, 'A people's art is the genesis of their freedom'.  Tonight, I hope that a stand for freedom was made by the BBC, when it showed us that when it comes down to it, good acting and strong scripts are at the core of great drama. Skin colour is a powerful signifier and brings with it numerous connotations that can be deciphered, mediated and interpreted by audiences in a myriad of ways. Let us hope that in future it's the story that grabs the headlines, rather than the skin colour. It's high time channel producers ensured mainstream drama encompasses the diversity of Great Britain, so that commentaries such as this need not be repeated.

Social networks, sociability, and a short film about love

Media pop psychologist Aric Sigman (who got his first broadcasting break on the LBC health show my dad presented and I produced back in the 90s)  has written an excellent report about the risks of using social networks,  in Biologist, the magazine of the Institute of Biology.

Dr Sigman was interviewed by the BBC and you can hear the report, and read more about his article here.

In brief, Dr Sigman warns that the aim of social networks - to keep people in touch - could be having a negative effect, especially on younger users, for whom online interaction increasingly is replacing face-to-face conversation. 

Naturally, there are pros and cons to this argument, with respondents to the BBC article arguing for both benefits and harm caused by the use of social networking sites.

Film stars repeat YouTube success story - News - South Manchester Reporter

www.southmanchesterreporter.co.uk

As a brilliant counterpoint to Dr Sigman's assertion that too many young people are online too much, up pops a fantastic short film, made by two 20 year old Media students at Manchester Metropolitan University. 

How To Say I Love You cost £200 to make, was shot in a morning, and garnered 650,000 hits in its first 24 hours on You Tube. Since its first posting a month ago it's had more than 1.7 million hits! Its makers, Hayley Stuart and Francesca Sophia, have produced a sharply observed commentary on how the Facebook generation still wants old fashioned romance to sweep them off their feet. It's just that for teens brought up on rapid Status updates, there isn't always time to waste on small talk.

How To Say I Love You is a powerful short film, that warrants your attention. Stuart and Sophia's previous YouTube upload, Olivia - Explorer, made for £7, has received over 1.3 million hits. Expect to see more from these two in years to come. Exceptional talent.

Small town music from the global village

BBC NEWS | Programmes | Click | Tecnobrega beat rocks Brazil

news.bbc.co.uk

A great story about the rise of Tecnobrega, a regional music phenomenon in Brazil. There, bedroom studios and the sale of CDs in market stalls has seen the rise of an alternative business model for the music industry; as well as a homegrown musical genre that's offering creative and commercial opportunities to those lacking formal training.

You can read more here.

A question of trust

It's always a risk relying on Wiki based sources for reliable information.

Wikis have the potential to be fantastic collaborative learning tools, but they need to be overseen by someone who's watching the History button, to ensure any changes to text are made in good faith, and not for malicious purposes.

The fact that anyone can alter the content on web-based Wikis in the public domain means they aren't reliable secondary sources of information, however high they might appear in search engine results.

This week's dodgy edit comes courtesy of the British Conservative Party, who altered the death of a grand master, in order to score a cheap political point. The BBC video below explains all.

Tories admit to Wiki-alteration

news.bbc.co.uk

You're never too young to publish

BBC NEWS | Technology | Nine-year-old writes iPhone code

news.bbc.co.uk

A great story on the BBC, about a nine year old boy from Singapore, who's written an App for the iPhone, that allows users to draw on screen.

Lim Ding Wen began playing with computers aged two, started programming aged seven, and thousands have downloaded his latest creation. 

It all goes to show that young pups can learn new tricks just as easily as older dogs. The technological revolution is opening up new lines of innovation and creativity. Long may it continue. 

Christian Bale - true artiste or crybaby?

I wasn't sure what to think when I heard wooden actor Christian Bale letting rip with a string of expletives. At first, I thought his rant against the director of photography, on the set of the new Terminator movie, was a joke. But as his anger became apparent, I was struck by the inappropriate nature of his rage.

I understand that when an actor is performing, none of the crew are supposed to move. In this case, the DoP had gone to check a light and entered into Bale's line of sight. However, in all the years I worked as a TV director neither I nor any of the talent with whom I worked subjected our colleagues to the haranguing, foul-mouthed outburst that Bale thinks is acceptable.

The film director Michael Winner, interviewed on BBC Radio 4s Today programme, took Bale's side. You can hear the interview here. All I can say is, if that's how film folk talk to each other, I'm glad I stuck to TV!

Finally, as if to show how the postmodern and inter-textual nature of the web-connected world is altering the speed and nature of content production and syndication, an American DJ has taken the rant and turned it into a song! Apparently, it's doing well in clubs. The world has indeed gone mad....

Boston.com writer Ty Burr summarises the state of modern celebrity succinctly, when he writes, "it's now a technological cargo cult in which we own any and all chunks of a celebrity not controlled by the official machine." 

Kangaroo bounced out of court!

An interesting development in the push for TV institutions to move to an online delivery model. The BBC has been running its wildly successful iPlayer for more than a year, and is now streaming BBC1 and BBC2 live on the Web. ITV, the other major terrestrial player, together with Channel 4 (whose public service remit is to offer innovative programming from under-represented quarters of British society) have both been offering a similar service.

All three, perhaps bizarrely, have been collaborating for the last 18 months or so on a joint venture, called Kangaroo. The aim was to offer consolidated services and, as I understand it, to sell on wholesale content.

Given the fact the three broadcasters between them produce the lion's share of TV content in the UK, it came as no surprise that the Competition Competition investigated.

Yesterday, it published its report, stopping Kangaroo from progressing. The report claims that to allow all three companies to effectively merge their online distribution and re-selling operations would be tantamount to creating a monopoly.

The Commission's view, which you can read in full here, was that audiences would be better served if the three were in competition with each other, and alternative suppliers.

Naturally, the BBC, Channel 4 and ITV are claiming that it's consumers who will lose out. 

Now, we'll never know. Personally, I always thought the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 made strange bedfellows. Given the ease with which content can be accessed online, I'm not sure what the benefits truly would have been to audiences. The main beneficiaries, I suspect, would have been the three companies, who could have leveraged economies of scale. 

Eyeless in Gaza

I was reminded of the lines from Milton's poem, Samson Agonistes, when reading about the following news development today:

Promise was that I
Should Israel from Philistian yoke deliver;
Ask for this great deliverer now, and find him
Eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves ...

The surprising news that caught my eye in the media world was the announcement that the BBC would not be televising an advert by the DEC (Disasters Emergency Committee) to raise funds for humanitarian aid in Gaza. The DEC is an umbrella organisation for 13 aid charities.

The BBC says that it was concerned about how aid would get through to Gaza, and given the fact that the story is still current and being reported on, felt it might damage its impartiality were it to air the ad.

It's a convention that either all or none of the broadcasters carry DEC appeals in the UK, so shortly after the BBC announced it wouldn't be lending a hand, all the other major players fell into line.

I'd like to say I feel disappointment, outrage, or some other meaningful emotion at this decision. But having lived in Israel and visited Palestine on a number of occasions while there, I know that the complexities of the situation are so challenging, that I must admit to a sense of bewilderment.

So what does this tell us about the media, in terms of representation and institutional issues? Probably that nothing is ever as simple as it seems on the surface, and what we see and consume on TV won't necessarily have a logical reason for being there. Just as importantly, it's crucial, as observers of the media, to keep tabs on what gets left out of the schedules. The gaps, the silences, and the omissions, can be as revealing, important and worthy of study and debate, as the programmes we deconstruct and textually analyse.

A Man for Our Time - captured by multimedia

Apart from being inspired by the rhetoric and passion of President Obama yesterday, I was struck by the fact that this was the first time I had watched a huge news story unfold live using the internet. 

I was working at school, I had stuff that needed doing, and so the ideal solution was to use the BBC's live feed from BBC1 online. What struck me was how good the streaming video looked, the fact it didn't crash at all, and also that below the video window were live rolling comments from BBC correspondents and viewers.  It certainly made me feel like I was part of a global village.

I suspect that most people watched the inauguration on the TV, because frankly at this moment in time that's the best medium for such an event. But that didn't stop the various media outlets innovating in the online arena.

I particularly liked the 3D rolling panorama offered by CNN who partnered with Facebook. The technology was supplied by Microsoft's Photosynth software. The end result provides what none of the newspaper photos quite managed this morning - some idea of the scale of the event in the Washington Mall. 

Over at the BBC, technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones tried out as many ways of watching the event as he could. His report makes for interesting reading.

A few weeks ago I wrote about a great online app called Wordle.net. You put in text, it analyses it into a word cloud - a visual representation of the text, based on the frequency of key words. Since then I've noticed it creeping into the mainstream media, and by today both the Guardian and the BBC were serving up word clouds of the President's speech, plus those of former leaders. 

So, a magnificent day for the new President and the nation he leads. An interesting glimpse too into the changing nature of media communication.

The pipe's the limit for SKY

Rupert Murdoch's Sky has revolutionised TV watching in the UK, bringing multi channel TV to the masses, in ways that seem unimaginable for those of us who remember the heady days of growing up with two BBC channels (1+2) plus ITV. 

In those days, the term 'water-cooler TV' did mean millions watching the same event, because choice was so limited.

Now, we live in an age of increasingly niche audience viewing habits, where even the long-running soaps have seen their audience figures decline comparatively.

From its initial offerings Sky has grown to dominate the pay TV market, sucking up many sports rights along the way, and transforming the fortunes of players and the experiences of audiences. Today's sports coverage is far slicker and soccer players' fees far more lucrative than anyone could have envisioned.

Technologically, Sky has continued to innovate, offering a hard disc recorder (Sky+), high definition variants, and now it is making another push into a new frontier.

Since the BBC launched the iPlayer more than a year ago, TV pundits have wondered how long it will take for a full convergence between online usage and TV viewing to occur.

Late last week Sky announced that it was now launching the Sky Player. For a monthly subscription that will be less than the cost of a satellite feed, users can watch live channel packages online, as well as download movies and other entertainment shows, using a proprietary player, that uses Microsoft Silverlight as the backbone for its Digital Rights Management. 

Mac users are catered for, but without the downloading facility for movies and entertainment. The Sky website says this will be coming in due course. I'm not sure if Mac users get a discount for the reduced service, but I intend to find out this week and will report back.

Either way, it represents a fascinating acknowledgement that audience tastes are changing and that for some people online delivery works better. This might be because people want to take downloaded shows to work, users spend more time online so this might be a way of generating revenue from those deserting the traditional sit back approach of conventional TV, or it might represent a chance for those in love with the service to maintain viewing habits wherever they might be.

What is certain is that the combination of advancing broadband availability, falling subscription costs, and rising audience acceptance of media delivery via online channels, is likely to fuel a rise in the viewing of moving image content on computer screens.

Is there a spanner in the works? Well, possibly there is. British Telecom (BT) is complaining that the media regulator, OFCOM, has capped the rates it can lease its lines to third parties at too low a rate. It's claiming this will hamper investment in new broadband infrastructure. The government has seen fit to bail out our banks. It will be interesting to see if it's prepared to invest in the backbone of our country's technological improvement.

Woz it all about?

It's very easy to become overly fixated on studying audiences and their changing leisure/media consumption patterns, without considering the powerful forces shaping the evolving dynamics of audience/institution interactions at a technological level.

What is often overlooked is the role that engineers play in the empowerment process.

So, it is with much pleasure that I came across this rare interview with Steve Wozniak, one of the co-founders of Apple and the engineering genius behind it in the beginning.

His views on hacking iPhones, the importance of engineers as the forces for change in mass communication, and other matters too, make this an engaging watch. I'm linking to the 12 minute version, but there's  a cut-down version too on the BBC. Personally, I think the longer version is worth the extra wait.

Click here to watch the interview.

The new face of journalism...is well worn

Ok, so maybe I'm on a roll here, but it needs to be said.

Back in 1994, when the old guard at BBC news laughed, when I trundled off to learn how to be a videojournalist with Michael Rosenblum, news visionary extraordinaire, I felt like I was getting to live in the future, only now. If you see what I mean.

Reading the following entry about how the Society of Editors is up in arms, about the BBC's plans for national rollout of local VJs, to produce content for its website, I feel a warm schadenfreude-filled glow welling up inside me. Why? Because although I pity those struggling to make a living from a dying medium (and let's be honest, how often do you read a local paper?) it makes me smile to see the use of VJs under the spotlight once more, not this time because of the nature of the job, but because of the job itself.

No-one seems to be arguing that being a videojournalist is a bad idea. In fact, it's a great idea. What the news editors are angry about, gathered together at their annual conference in Bristol, is that the BBC is muscling in on their territory.

So, here is a radical idea...why don't we ditch the videojournalist tag, agree that content production and reporting skills/styles have changed forever, and just call these guys journalists? A journalist could be making audio, video, print, or graphic content. If we move beyond thinking that the medium is the message, as McLuhan postulated, and consider that the medium delivers multiple versions of the same message, then all of this nonsense could be resolved.

There is, of course, the issue of the BBC leveraging its behemoth like weight, aided and abetted by the billions of pounds raised in Licence fees, to distort commercial markets. On that score, the editors have a point, although the BBC's riposte that it is delivering on its Public Service Broadcasting remit, is an interesting one. Does video online count as broadcasting? Answers on a big postcard please....

Certainly, if you're in the newspaper business, and especially at the local end, now isn't the time for bleating or idle ideology. I'm lucky. I'm an educator these days, so I can sit on the sidelines and not worry about when and where the next commission might appear. If I were trying to make an honest buck in the current climate I'd be looking at integrating every which way. Link to Facebook, add audio, video, Twitter text, whatever you can imagine to make connections with an audience on the run from the product you've been touting for the last century.

For those of you in the business and thinking that maybe I'm shooting from the hip, without any backbone to support my argument, let me tell you something. The students I'm working with now, even aged 11, are making films and podcasts that I would have been proud to call my own a decade ago. They're moving into making their own motion gaphics and they are hungry for change.

Technology and rising media literacy means the next generation of paying subscribers will know the production tricks, will be able to deconstruct the machinery behind the content, and they'll be adept at making their own content too. Text on a page just ain't gonna cut it.

To conclude then, change must happen and it must take place fast. Strangely, I look at what's happening, remember the derision that greeted those of us who speculated a decade ago that this might be where we'd end up, and wonder why it all seems to have become so difficult?

Like I said at the start, it's the future waiting for now - but some of us were there yesterday.