This year’s RTS chair is the Channel 4 chief executive David Abraham who, along with Channel 4 News host Jon Snow, will ask delegates to pick up iPads and suggest how the TV landscape will look in 2023.
Abraham has an agenda here. Back in 2003, nobody factored in the impact of internet-based television; YouTube wouldn’t be founded for another two years, and Netflix was a DVD supplier with no foothold in the UK. But in 2013, all the momentum is with broadband-supplied video content. The Channel 4 boss knows this. “What are the tectonic changes for the next 10 years? Well, it’s clearly going to be around the migration of viewers towards short form [video], mobile and broadband,” he told me last week.
The question is how rapidly that transformation occurs. Abraham will ask the Cambridge delegates whether they believe the expansion of broadband viewing will grow from the current 3 per cent to a modest 20 per cent over the next decade – or whether there will be a more dramatic shift and the majority of our viewing will be on phones, tablets and yet-to-be-invented mobile devices. In 2003, the RTS audience favoured the most doom-laden of predictions: the death of linear (scheduled) TV. They overstated that.
