Wide Area News
Catch it if you can
by Russell Brown
It’s a long, winding path to the digital future.
Towards the end of last year, there was a flurry of activity among media companies anxious to fly their colours for 2007 before packing up for Christmas.
Both the major newspaper websites – Fairfax’s Stuff and APN’s Herald online –- unveiled significant revamps on the same day, replacing their ageing designs with more attractive and more easily navigable pages. The Herald project seems the more adventurous, with RSS feeds, buttons for news aggregators such as Digg.com (which give users the ability to rank news stories themselves) and the promise of blogs and discussion forums.
Meanwhile, the country’s largest independent news site, Scoop, began previewing its own version of the Digg concept, Scoop It.
But the most striking announcement in a busy season was from Television New Zealand, which published a document titled “Inspiring on Every Screen: TVNZ’s Strategy 2007-2011”. It contained more genuine evidence of intent than anyone could have expected from an organisation where initiatives have often been lost amid management infighting and overweening caution.
“Absolutely,” says TVNZ CEO Rick Ellis. “There’s been a lot of talk and no action. But we’re starting to get with it.”
The new strategy, ordered up by Ellis in June, draws on advice from “over 60 of TVNZ’s best professionals” and “key external partners” to set a new course for the digital age. In October, Ellis signed off a new pro-ject, TVNZ ondemand, which from its March 1 launch will allow New Zealanders to download both free and paid content via the internet.
Both local and overseas programmes will be available for day-after download and, in some cases, the purchase of entire series online. Pricing will be around $2 per half-hour; customers will draw on accounts of “play points” stocked by credit card payment.
Among the 50 or so free clips from the TVNZ archive at launch are likely to be – subject to rights clearance – some iconic New Zealand series. Say, The Governor?
“That’s my plan,” says Ellis. “There are some rights issues that we need to navigate, but wouldn’t that be great? I’d love to see The Governor back up there.”
But there’s a catch. In fact, heaps of catches. The new content, including news bulletins, will be available only to Windows PC users in New Zealand (expatriates will be blocked from downloading the necessary licence). Although the pricing is comparable with that charged for such flagship shows as Desperate Housewives via the US iTunes Video Store, TVNZ ondemand users will find that the shows they download will cease to play after a week, thanks to the Windows Media digital rights management (DRM) embedded in the files. iTunes customers get to keep theirs and play them as often as they want.
Another key question is whether content providers such as TVNZ are the best people to be their own retailers. The major music companies tried it with the MusicNet cartel, failed, and were eventually put out of their misery by the iTunes Music Store, which got the music downloads business on the road. Even the BBC is looking to third parties for distribution.
The approach to the archive will also be interesting. The government has repeatedly endorsed – without really saying what it means – the idea of a New Zealand Creative Commons licence for public archive content. That means open access to such content, and probably the ability to make derivative use of it in other creative works. TVNZ will release its archive content, even the free stuff, with DRM on it, so it won’t be open, nor available for re-use or viewable on MacOS computers (Mac support may arrive mid-year).
The final wrinkle is really about the global TV market. TVNZ may well offer downloads of the latest Desperate Housewives, but it will do so months after the episodes have screened in the US. The same early-adopter market TVNZ hopes to woo to its store is also the group mostly likely to have already (illegally) downloaded the episodes within days of their first screening. For the moment, there is nothing TVNZ can do about this.
This is not to diminish the significance of its bold new vision, or of the dispatch with which it is acting on that vision. It just seems fair to say that the path to the new, digital future will not be straightforward. But perhaps it never is.
Email: russb@dubwise.co.nz
