It’s extremely rare that a technology does change everything, and when it has, it has always been in the consumer realm – and we’ve always failed to spot it. Nobody saw what smartphones were going to do. Nobody saw what consumer texting would lead to, and then what social video would lead to. The biggest changes have actually been missed by us. I therefore think what is really important for us to do now is to acknowledge that we’ve had 20 years of dramatic and rapid change. That’s how long we’ve been saying “wow, who would have thought it?” or “can you believe it?”. All those phrases have been going for 20- odd years. We do have quite a lot to look back on that could provide us with clues, particularly around human behaviours and the way that technologies get adopted. Secondly, we really should know by now that the biggest changes to impact media and entertainment won’t come from within. They’ll come from without; from what consumers are doing, either with hardware or, more probably, the software that sits on that hardware – and that’s where we need to be a bit more imaginative. For instance, consumers are already beginning to use generative AI as an everyday tool. How will that impact
society, and then what part of that societal impact will go on to affect media and entertainment? Are there any trends you feel confident will play out? A big emphasis from the DPP from here on is for us to be more specific and more bold about what precisely we believe is going to happen. It’s very easy to raise these things as questions or ‘we think this could happen and this might happen’. Are there some things we are absolutely rock-solid certain are going to happen or have happened and will never go back? There are easy ones, like the meaning of what content is being redefined and not going back. Content will now exist in a huge range of forms, formats, durations, with a huge diversity of supply and a massive range of platforms. That’s just a reality. So it’s very important not to focus our thinking about digital transformation, for instance, around an outmoded idea of the supply of long-form content from historic media organisations. Yes, that’ll remain important for a while, but it’s only going to be a part of the content landscape. It shouldn’t be the defining part of tech supply.
and special means of doing things is going to be in trouble because you can’t afford to do that any more. Now people are much more focused on how partnerships, interoperable ecosystems and so on can actually end up benefitting everybody. Is there anything we can do as an industry to make the future feel predictable and controllable? As an industry, we historically have been absolutely terrible at prediction. We tend to get infatuated with whatever new thing has emerged. From 3D through the first Google Glasses, through AI interactivity and, of course, VR and then AI, we always like to say: ‘insert name of technology’ will change everything. We don’t use our experience and expertise to ask the much more interesting and challenging question of precisely how this technology will impact the industry.
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