Network Insight Institute

Guy Gadney

Guy Gadney, General Manager, Content Programming, Bigpond Media

Guy Gadney is GM Content Programming for Telstra BigPond, overseeing the broadband and narrowband sites for AFL, V8 Supercars, NRL, Racing, and BigPond Games. He joined Telstra after leading and completing the delivery of the Electronic Program Guide (EPG) and Games channels for FOXTEL Digital.

Guy began working in new media in the late 80's and has produced projects for laserdisc, CD-ROM, internet, multiplayer games and interactive TV. He was Head of Multimedia for Penguin Books UK in the mid-nineties before going on to produce large-scale websites for the band Oasis, the Guardian newspaper's Football and Cricket sites, and the FoxKids European internet rollouts.

In 1999 he joined BBC Worldwide looking after all the interactive TV and broadband developments. While there he conceived and produced over 30 broadband and interactive projects for a variety of BBC licences including Top of the Pops, Top Gear, the Rough Guides series and Gardener's World.

After the BBC, Guy produced the online massively multiplayer game Diaspora which pitted thousands of online players against each other simultaneously, and the development of 3D games engines for PC and Playstation. The Diaspora technology was also used as a basis for a multiplayer quiz engine which was used by Sky, NME, Eurosport, Wisden, and a number of other movie, TV and sports websites. His interactive TV work during this time included leading the production of the four interactive TV portals for Fish4.co.uk, and two EPGs for UK cable TV and the Radio Times.

Guy has been on the judging panel of BAFTA's interactive awards in the UK and serves on the board of the Australian Interactive Media Industry Association (AIMIA) in Australia.

Guy's comments from the seminar

We all agree, as a start, that DRM is a good thing.  I think we have seen what happens when you put a load of content out without DRM and that we need to be able to monitor and then create a business model around the content that we put online.

So where are we at the moment online?  We have sites like BigPond Music.. We have movie sites. We can download short-form content and indeed, on a couple of sites in the United States, movies as well.

I will touch on peer-to-peer which seems to have escaped most people's radar today, probably because it is a bit contentious. We have also got an increasing amount of video being distributed to mobile phones. I think, to most people in the room, this might seem a bit weird; why would you want to look at something which is ostensibly a cinema experience, or indeed, a TV experience, on a mobile phone?!  But people are using this service and it is becoming, quite unexpectedly, successful.

To narrow it down, I want to pick on two maturing trends that I have seen emerge online. One is user-generated content and the other one is the behavioural characteristics of media consumers online.

User-generated content started off with websites, moved to forums, moved to instant messaging, blogs and then broadband blogs.  What is interesting about user-generated content is that it is the hardware manufacturers who are making it easier to produce user-generated content.  Hardware manufacturers producing digital cameras and MP3 players, and things that, are opening up a whole market because it is in their interests to do so.  They are also creating problems for us as content manufacturers! We have to be very mindful of the innovators like Creative Labs' and work with them to see how broadband user generated content will be consumed in the future.

Blogs are interesting because they prove that people want to have more personal views on topics. Innovative online newspapers, like The Guardian, are now moving wholesale into producing blogs and online blogs as part of their content offering. Into the broadband world, we are starting to see the rise of genres like Machinama, which, if you haven't seen it, I thoroughly recommend. Have a look at projects like Red v Blue, where users took the Halo game published on X-Box and created another storyline around it. It was quite a funny little sitcom set in the virtual world of Halo 2 and is now available on DVD. So we are starting to see that consumers want to take control of their media, want to input into that media, and guess what? It is interactivity.

The general behaviour of the media consumer is more interesting.  From my perspective of working in this industry building broadband sites, the hardest thing that we can do, and the thing we want to try to avoid the whole time, is to change users' behaviour. If we put up a site on the principle of build it and they will come then that site will have made its first step a wrong one.  A person who knows what they like cannot be forced into going down particular roads.

The Internet is now in its 35th year. When it was first set up, it was designed to be a network of networks to communicate between individuals. That is what the Internet was built to do.  It is interesting to consider, when we are trying to work out what our distribution mechanisms are, if we are trying to force a one-to-many distribution mechanism within the commercial environment, we are forcing it onto a network that is not actually designed to do that.  The network is designed to communicate between the many-to-many, so when we talk about DRM, we have to be mindful that we create products which let users communicate words, pictures and files in a way which suits existing behaviour - what I call user-initiated distribution. From my experience, multimedia is about creating content that suits the medium.  We have to do that. If we have a story to tell, we have to tell it in a form that suits that medium.

The record industry has a primary goal to commercialise and distribute music content on behalf of its artists.  Given the events of the last few years, if you try to map that primary goal onto what has actually happened with the rise of Napster, you have seen that there is discrepancy between the two. As an industry, we have a duty to learn from that when we are defining our strategies for broadband and movie content.

CDs and other hard media are not suited to this user-initiated distribution. To share a CD up until now meant: recording it, putting it in the post, or just meeting up, to share compilations. The Internet is really designed to rapidly distribute and share data and there are strong indications that this is what people want to do. That is where blogs have come from. That is where all this user-generated content is coming from. And that is why there is the rise of peer-to-peer networks, and inter-personal communications generally. People like to talk!

There are a couple of reports that I thought were interesting to reference and the discrepancies between these reports are quite thought provoking. There are US reports showing that the dominant demographics of those who were involved in file sharing activities were: the young; students; those from low-earning backgrounds; and ethic minorities.  Columbia University looked into the motivations of file sharing and they brought up some interesting results that the dominant factor primarily based around students, is that it is not about cost saving, it is about convenience. Of secondary importance was the ability to introduce friends to new pieces of content. Cost savings were quite low down that list.

What we draw from that is that the primary goal is more about a social, behavioural way of interacting with your mates and experiencing content rather than something about cutting off a revenue stream.

The second report from the OCD indicated that file sharers are just as likely to be high earners as low earners and more than likely have a University degree. While the demographics of the two reports may contradict each other, people are rapidly discovering the convenience of using the Internet to create, massage, and consume media. 

So, how do we progress? 

To my mind, we need to understand both the existing user behaviour and also the business models surrounding user-initiated distribution.  Turner Broadcasting recently stated that, as a content company, they are open to any and all forms of distribution of video content so long as the audience could be accurately measured for the purposes of advertising sales. That, to me, blew an enormous hole in a lot of arguments about just making it difficult for people to distribute content.

Kim Williams made a lot of salient points in describing what FOXTEL is trying to achieve.  From a user perspective, it is flexible, it is on demand, it is personalised, it is what you want, and when you want it. We have got the pressure of portability and we have got the simplicity of use and simplicity of access versus the difficulty of bypassing it. That summed up for me exactly what we are trying to do.  We are trying to create the simplicity of use, simplicity of distribution and balance that we need against the difficulty of bypassing it.  The problem is, if you concentrate all your eggs into the difficulty of bypassing basket, you're still going to get people getting over the hurdles and showing everyone else how to do it. As the guy who twice cracked the iTunes Code put it: I just don't like being locked out of stuff.

Ashley Highfield, as the Director of New Media at BBC, commenting on video distribution for the BBC said;"If we don't enter the market then exactly what happened to the music industry could happen to us; where we ignore it, keep our heads in the sand and everybody starts posting the content up there and ripping us off".  What Ashley realised is that he is a facilitator, he is a first tier distributor, where the second tier distributors are going to be the users who are starting to circulate this content and put it into the marketplace.  As a public service organisation they are applying their own business rules in a way that works from a consumer perspective.

I thought Rob Nichols' speech brought out some awesome pieces of insight around balancing the needs of the viewers with those of the rights holders.  It highlighted the balance between what the user wants and we want to get out of the users.

In summary, there is an innate desire for users to copy and distribute content and I think to try to change that behaviour now is too difficult.  We need to provide simplicity of use and simplicity of access while corralling our business models to match the new distribution opportunities. I've had a couple of people say to me that, from a user perspective the best DRM is no DRM. I agree that DRM needs to be virtually invisible to consumers; it can't be a hurdle.  And finally, we need to allow people to comply with the rules.  One of my big takeouts from today is the idea that, if we create the framework for someone to buy the content that we want them to, in the way that they want to, then I think we have a viable business.  DRM which is secure but which does not stop the broader usage of content is where we should be aiming.

NOTE: The views and opinions expressed in this speech are purely personal and do not necessarily reflect or represent those of Telstra or its policies with regard to the subject matter of this speech.

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