Tuesday 5th December: Charlotte Henry on the past, present and future of TV

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It’s nearly time for Media Moments, our annual report looking at the biggest trends which have affected publishers this year. 2023’s edition will explore AI (of course), newsletters, podcasts, DE&I, subscriptions and more. Launching next week, but you can pre-register to get it sent straight to you once we hit ‘Go live’!

What is this, a crossover episode?

Well, yes. On this week’s podcast (which is also this week’s edition of The Addition) we hear from broadcast and TV analyst Charlotte Henry. She’s written the broadcast chapter of our upcoming Media Moments 2023 report, so it was only right and proper that we got her on to discuss all the broadcast trends of the past year. It’s been a big old year for TV — both good and bad — so it was great to get an expert in to chat it all over.

My favourite part of the discussion was about the role of exclusive content. Charlotte brought up the fact that Paramount+, despite some notable success in other areas, has yet to have a bona fide hit on the scale of Stranger Things or some of the tentpole programming of other services. Meanwhile BBC Studios — the commercial arm of the BBC — is making hay with its vast stock of exclusive content.

It’s a reminder that, when it comes to broadcast strategy, it doesn’t matter how amazing your sales technique is if you have nothing spectacular to sell. That feeds into the rest of our discussion, from the doldrums of advertising sales across linear broadcasts to the need to differentiate a streaming service from the many other competitors out there.

This news broke just too late for us to include in the latest episode — but we did speculate about the likelihood of rebundling so go us. From what the Hollywood Reporter is suggesting it sounds as though Netflix’s success in terms of its ad-based tier is opening doors to ‘rebundling’. As to whether that’s what consumers want, I suppose we’ll see that next year when the results start coming out.

Spotify is cutting 1,500 jobs and its CEO isn’t shy about saying its bottom line is the cause. Despite a relatively strong set of recent results Daniel Ek has said there’s some distance between where the audio platforms wants to be and where it is, so farewell to the workers. I suppose it’s mildly better than Klarna’s CEO explicitly saying he wants AI to replace his workers…

Again related to the discussion in this week’s episode about trust in the BBC and its relationship with flashpoints of political importance, a study by the thinktank More In Common has found that the majority of people exposed to the BBC’s coverage of the war in Gaza has found it be politically neutral. Now whether you trust More In Common, that’s a different quandary. It’s turtles all the way down when it comes to trust.

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