The good news is…nobody knows

Michael Hedges June 12, 2008 Follow on Twitter

The accountants in our midst thrive on certainty. So do the lawyers. So do the investment bankers. To win their faith – necessary for good cash flow management - we give them forecasts, predictions, prognostications to satisfy their inner need to be ahead of the game. What happens when we say, “We don’t know what the future holds”.

Predictably, media conferences always offer the requisite ‘the future is going to be bright’ speech. Nobody pays €1000 to hear a grumpy old guy talk about more work, less money or the end of ‘something’. If a ‘bright future’ speech is to difficult to spin, try ‘glimmer of hope’ or ‘silver lining.’

We’ve seen and heard them all, yes? For much of the last decade the forecasts and happy speeches have delivered, at best, nonsense and, at worst, damage in the face of ignorance. We only need to consider the words spent selling digital dividend, digital something or digital anything only to see real world practice falling quite short. And think, too, of the high priced forecasts predicting rapid take-up of this or that.

A modest group of broadcasters and policy makers met in Brussels under auspices of the Association of European Radios (AER) this week (June 10) to thrash out the burning issues of 2008 and beyond. Both participants and speakers were regulars on the media conference circuit; their opinions considered and thoughtful. Instead of repeating long lost posturing or equally discredited predictions one after another took to the head table offering a theme new to media conferences: We don’t know what the future holds for us. And it’s OK.

The first speaker, a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) talking about spectrum management policy, could have been dry and deadly dull. But this was Spanish MEP Ignasi Guardans who has, unlike most MEPs, actually seen the inside of a broadcasting station. He’s had a radio program in Spain for several years. He’s also a member of the all-powerful EuroParl Culture and Education committee.

“Spectrum is a public resource,” said Sr. Guardans, reiterating a legal principle commonly held in Europe and North America. “Spectrum policy cannot be determined by market value alone.”

“We know that the cake is limited,” he said of physics’ basic truth, “but we don’t know how much will be needed.” 

Sr. Guardans supports a “nuanced approach” to spectrum management policy and sees the European Commission harmonizing “aspects” of spectrum. And he differentiates between policies that are technology neutral (“Not debatable.”) and service neutrality. And he criticizes fellow MEPs for supporting the "any frequency can be used for anything, with exceptions" approach. European broadcasters, public and private, oppose the principle of service neutrality, seen as benefiting big telecoms.

"The principle of service neutrality, as established by the Commission, needs to be seriously challenged," said Sr. Guardans' spokesperson to clarify the point.

“Nobody knows,” said Sr. Guardans, ”how spectrum management will develop over the next ten years.”  So much for the experts; the Council of European telecom ministers drop-kicked the Commission’s plan to form a single pan-European telecom agency, part of the ‘telecoms package’. Sr. Guardans reminded the AER Conference that international treaties through the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) “would be respected.”

No forecasts have been more consistently wrong as those predicting take-up of digital broadcasting. Enders Analysis radio expert Grant Goddard continued the ‘we don’t know’ theme by reminding broadcasters that in the UK, where digital radio take-up has been significant if not exactly as robust as predictions, 80% of radio listening is with analogue receivers. With data from forecasts shown over time Goddard showed that predictions have been consistently wrong.

Another of Goddard’s presentation slides stunned – and not in a negative sense – the assembled broadcasters. Digital take-up, he said, depends on one thing: content. And compelling content cannot be produced on the cheap. As evidence he presented a graph showing the hour-by-hour audience over three RAJAR survey periods for digital radio channel Xfm in the UK. It was the classic before and after test. Before Xfm fired the DJs daytime listening was strong. After, it was gone.

The content theme was taken up by Markus Ruoss, Swiss radio station owner and one of the preeminent experts on digital radio technology. “Technology has done all it can,” he said. “Now it’s up to good content and marketing.”

The energy in the room was high and participants were eager for the lunch break to gather in small groups to discuss and expand.

“That was very positive,” said Emmis Belgium Broadcasting CEO David Daggelinckx during the break. Radio broadcasters, especially in the private sector, take uncertainty as a given and accept the frailty of shifting audiences. Most of the attending broadcasters – and most of those attending, like the Emmis International stations, practice ‘content-rich’ programming – found a certain resonance with the morning conference speakers.

That’s not to say that everybody heard the same message. “I found it very negative,” said the European Commission DG Info Society and Media representative. It was her first time meeting with radio broadcasters. She said she’d like to hear more from broadcasters. That, too, is the good news.

The Association of European Radios (AER), Emmis International and Ruoss AG are ftm Corporate Members