Tuesday 30th January: Channel 4 aims to be "digital-first" service

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Whatever the mid- to long-term future of Channel 4 holds, the near-future is going to be very painful. As Peter included in yesterday’s newsletter there are a huge amount of job cuts coming at the public service broadcaster, which it is blaming squarely on declining TV ad spend and a challenging advertising market in general.

In addition to the cuts, the broadcaster has just announced it will be selling its London HQ as it tries to increase the proportion of its workforce outside the English capital. Like most British media, it is true that C4 is overly invested in London — but it’s hard not to see this as something that’s been forced upon it by these financial strictures.

The Hollywood Reporter article linked above, and this one from Deadline, go into greater detail about C4’s ambitions around becoming digital first — but the worry is of course that as it has to change and adapt to the streaming landscape it loses something of what made the channel so special. It took a punt on shows that would otherwise never have been commissioned. We can’t afford to lose it.

In an ideal world mankind would lounge around eating grapes, drinking wine and playing games all day. Until then, though, we’re stuck with trying to scrape together enough money to survive. For the NYT games are, at least, a big part of that strategy — its puzzles and games were played over 8bn times last year, and are a crucial part of its subscription funnel.

That ads are coming to basic Prime subscriptions isn’t news, but there are some details in here about the extent to which Prime Video’s ad loads will differ from traditional TV. I’m more interested in the consumer backlash here — it is grotesquely anti-consumer to actively make a service worse purely to gain ad revenue, but cynically I’m afraid that this ‘backlash’ will achieve practically nothing.

I always think this argument has been settled, but then new points of view pop up. This is a take on why people write magazines off as a thing of the past, but it’s also a reminder of the level of emotional investment people have in the medium.

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