Traditional media - two waves of digitalization

For a lot of people that have been in the TV industry for the last 10, 15, 20 years, there was one first wave of digital change, which was really about more choice, and a little bit more control. And that first digital wave was about the digitisation of existing broadcast models; so it was about satellite television, cable television, and that introduced a huge amount of choice, and was a very seismic change to the industry. But it didn't change the paradigm of broadcasting, it didn't change the relationship to the audience; occasionally the audience had a little bit more control with, like; red button, interactive. But even then, they weren't really in control. The second wave, which we're kind of going into now, is the second digital wave, that's around the internet and IP, where actually the people who are your competitors are completely different, the value chain is completely different; it's around search, it's around context, and it's not around content, it's not about distribution; all of those things are changing, and that's a far more radical change. So that two-wave model was one that we were using internally to say to people, you know: There's actually two digital changes here, you know, what you've been getting your heads around with regard to satellite and Sky and all these companies, is completely different from the conversations we need to be having around Google and Apple and Microsoft and Sony and other players in those spaces. And it's also about the way that in that second change, users are very often the innovators and the disrupters, and your competitors sometimes, or collaborators, just as much as it might be large businesses. So that two-wave model was really a model that we used at the BBC to try and get people to understand exactly what we've been going through. And not necessarily just about technology, but more about how that technology changed our market, and how it changed our relationship with our audience.