Acceptance speech

Every so often, someone says something that indicates that a revolution has happened. Often, the person who says it does not realise the true significance of their words. It happened recently in the Radio Times, a venerable television (and radio!) listings magazine in the UK, and probably one of the oldest such magazines in the world.

In a interview, Julia McKenzie, the latest actress to fill the role of Agatha' Cristie's 'Miss Marple' on the small screen in the UK, said that people would have to get used to her replacing any previous holders of the role. Now I have no problems with the quote, nor Julia McKenzie, and there are people who have called this arrogance, but I'm not one of them.

Instead, I think that it is a remarkable statement that completely misses the point, and in doing so, it reveals some fascinating things about what is happening to television. Why do I think this? Here's why:

Julia's statement says that people have to accept that she is going to be the Miss Marple that they will see on their televisions, but neither is actually true. There is now nothing to stop people watching any of the previous Miss Marples, and so the Miss Marple that appears on televisions could be any one of them - via repeats on terrestrial channels, DVDs, satellite/cable channels that re-run programmes, internet players like the BBC's runaway success: iPlayer, etc. So Julia may not be the Miss Marple that people see, nor do people have to accept her in that role. People now have a choice, and her statement clearly indicates that she thinks they do not. Now this did indeed used to be the case: before video recording became a commodity, and before digital hard disk recording of TV (PVRs, TiVo, Sky Plus, etc), and before the internet, then you watched broadcast television, or you didn't - just two choices.

But things are not like that anymore. There are many ways to watch television, and all of them give people choice where they used to have none. And rather like giving people access to personal transportation devices like cars/automobiles, taking them away isn't going to be easy. The freedom that people now have to watch what they want, when they want to, is going to be very difficult to take away. But there's more to it than that.

People are now used to flexibility in watching television in some ways, but there are other flexibilities that are yet to come. The next digital revolution involves what happens inside a television programme, instead of what happens around it. The coming generation of television will enable us to change what happens inside a programme, what we want to happen, when we want it to happen. Miss Marple will never be the same again!

Related articles by Zemanta

• Agatha Christie's Miss Marple back on screen with Julia McKenzie (telegraph.co.uk)
• The fresh face of Miss Marple (news.bbc.co.uk)

Is it okay, or isn't it?

You know when you get that sudden sinking feeling because you realise that you may have inadvertently done something wrong? Something triggers the putting of things together in your head and you have a moment of panic where the world wobbles a bit?

It happened to me today.

There I was, listening to the idle banter at work, and the subject of Top Gear came up, and I thought about watching the episode in question in iPlayer, the Beeb's phenomenally successful 'catch-up TV' player. Which is when the guilt suddenly overwhelmed me - it suddenly occurred to me that I had watched programmes on iPlayer at work, without a TV licence! I have a TV licence at home, but not at work...

Time moves slowly under these circumstances. The web browser crawled, snail-like, to the FAQs and an intriguing link to the TV licencing web-site, where it seemed to indicate that watching 'live' TV required a licence. The link away from the FAQs intrigued me, so I went back to the iPlayer web-site and dug around a bit more...

Which is when things got really interesting.

The iPlayer web-site and other places make it very clear that you can't watch a tv programme using iPlayer if it is being broadcast at the same time - a 'simulcast' - without a TV licence. But if the programme isn't being shown at the same time - 'live' - then you don't need a TV licence. All of which seemed clear enough, until I thought about what a 'simulcast' means...

Top Gear is one of the BBC's most widely sold programmes. Many countries show it, and so there is a finite probability that when you watch it on iPlayer, it is also being shown in one of these countries. Multiply that small but finite probability with the large number of people using iPlayer, and you end up with the realisation that for some of these people, they are watching Top Gear at the same time as it is being broadcast, somewhere in the world. Now with lots of countries showing it, and no easy way of finding out if is is being shown at the time that you want to watch it on iPlayer, this means that you have no way of knowing if it is being broadcast at the same time, and so you don't know if you need a TV licence in order to watch it. Alternatively, then you have to limit what you mean by a 'simulcast' to a limited geographical area, which it currently isn't...

So as far as I can see, there's no way of knowing for certain if you need, or don't need, a TV licence in order to watch a programme on iPlayer. So you can't know definitively if you are actually breaking the law, but you can work out, reasonably accurately, what the odds are that you are. Deliciously ironic, particularly since the more popular a programme is, the greater the chance of unknowingly breaking the law. I'm expecting the TV licencing people to start sending out demands any moment now...