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)

Personalized video blog musings

Real Time Content is my day-job (this blog is my night-job), and so I'm happy to be able to introduce the new blog that I've been working on recently.

Now a blog that writes about personalized video might seem unusual, but the main web-site has plenty of video examples on it, and so the blog is actually like an accompanying newsletter or newspaper - which is what a blog should be!

So, if you want to get an insider's view of personalized video from the experts, you now know the blog to visit...

Eagle-eyed readers might notice that whilst this blog is done in Google's Blogger, the Real Time Content blog is done in Word Press. So a quick comparative review is probably in order, since I've now spent quite a bit of time using both environments. Here's my informed opinion:

• Blogger is quick to throw a site together (with a shallow learning curve), simple to use, and just works. Some scope for customisation, but not very much - which keeps things manageable, avoids over-perfectionism, and delivers finished sites. Adding posts is easy.

• Word Press takes longer to create (and a steeper learning curve) a site, requires a bit more knowledge to use, and requires quite a bit of knowledge to go beyond the basics. There is enormous scope for customisation, in fact, you can customise just about anything to a very fine degree. Perfectionists will love tweaking the look and never quite finishing a site. Adding posts is fairly easy, but you need a some knowledge to exploit all of the power that is provided.

In other words, the two are ideally suited to two very different approaches. Blogger is great for a quick blog, whilst Word Press is perfect for people who like to tweak, improve, adjust, alter...