4IP Blog

Last Saturday, Clay Shirky gave the FutureView keynote at the Edinburgh TV Festival. Clay is a fantastic public speaker, and has been one of the most insightful analysts of emerging social media trends over the last 10 years or so. This year, he published “Here Comes Everybody”, a brilliant overview of how social media technologies are giving people the power to ‘organise without organisations’.

The message of Clay’s talk was simple - we are now living in the first post-Gutenberg economy. Although Gutenberg radically democratised the production and dissemination of information with his printing press, the expertise and costs involved were still significant enough to warrant filtering what gets published. The economic risk involved in printing 100s or 1000s of copies of a book, not yet knowing the demand from the public, meant that the role of flitering content fell to those who owned the means of production - the Publishers. This Gutenberg economic model - Filter, then Publish - has held steady for every mass media technology since, including cinema, radio and obviously TV.

With the advent of the Internet, the tools for production and distribution have been further democratised, so that the economic risk involved in distributing content can be virtually zero. In this Post-Gutenberg economy, the best strategy is to Publish, then Filter, as the economic cost of making decisions about what might or might not succeed can be more expensive than actually making the content.

Notice the phrase ‘can be’ appears twice in that last paragraph? This is critical, and points to the way in which Post-Gutenberg economics are most often misunderstood. Clay addressed two concerns that most established TV producers have with the way content is being made on the internet - “Isn’t most of it just crap?” and “How can we make enough money to make anything that’s *good*?”

Clay pointed out that content production now exists not in a binary opposition, with professional on one side and amateur on the other, but on a spectrum, from individuals making comments or uploading pictures to friends all the way to Lost and Heroes. Much of the content on, for example, Youtube, is crap, at least to the mass tastes that traditional TV has tried to target. But if the cost of putting up this content is virtually nil, then why not? Even if only a few friends look at your video, for most people, that’s validation enough.

As for the money question, Clay pointed out that we need to explore different business models - its not a case of just moving your whole business from Plan A to Plan B, but in trying to find ways of innovating and experimenting, and using the feedback you get to inform better and better strategies. In one of the most pithy comments in his talk, Clay explained that the way content is filtered on the internet is not through expensive meetings with channel controllers and marketing experts, but through ignorance - it just doesn’t get watched.

In Q&As, the TV producers in the audience came back time and time again to this money question, all of them wanting a simple panacea for how they can turn attention on the internet into cash. But in a comment on Twitter afterwards, he said these missed the point:

Just gave a talk @ a TV conf. Talked about new economics of production. Not *one* question was “How can we lower our costs?” The econ questions were versions of “How can we raise enough revenue on the web to pay for our pre-web cost structures?”

This is the single biggest risk facing existing content producers shifting from a Gutenberg model to a Post-Gutenberg model. In seeking to maintain their existing cost structures and ways of working, they miss the real opportunity, which is to find ways of making content that is faster, more flexible, and crucially - cheaper. This doesn’t mean that it can’t have impact or quality for its audience - Clay said that content producers need to focus on making content that creates passion amongst its audience, rather than focusing on scale.

Publish, then filter; Passion, not scale - these should be stapled onto the walls of anyone interested in creating value - public or commercial - on the internet. And they should be in the DNA of anyone commissioning for 4iP.

Matt Locke

Tom Loosemore has agreed to join Channel 4 to head up the 4IP project.

Tom has an outstanding range of experience in public service new media, and has a huge passion for the areas which 4IP is setting out to explore. His various stints as both a thinker and doer include Ofcom, the BBC, the Cabinet Office and mysociety. He’s also got experience of both internet start ups and larger media companies. If you want to see some of the projects he’s been involved with, take a look at upmystreet, theyworkforyou and showusabetterway.
He will be joining in late September, and accelerating the momentum that we’ve made behind the scenes over the last few months.
The official press release is here, and he’ll no doubt be a regular blogger on the 4IP site as soon as the dust has settled.
It took us longer than expected to make this appointment, but you can’t rush these things. Thanks for bearing with us in the meantime.
Jon Gisby

Imagine the scene. There is a freak accident in the Channel 4 post room. Instead of being invited to ‘an exclusive webcast of the launch of 4IP’, I’m invited to launch 4IP. I’ve got it in writing. It is a contractual obligation. I’m the boss!

As soon as I get my feet under the desk, I buzz my PA for an iced VitaminWater. I arrange a couple of lunches at hyper-trendy Kazuti. Then I think about my slate. What on earth should I commission? I could start with a couple interactive TV-related games. But crikey, is that innovative enough? I stare out of my corner office window. I feel the panic rising. I buzz for a warmed VitaminWater.

That gets me thinking. What is the web good for? What is Channel 4 good for?

The web

The exiting thing about the web is that it allows for two-way communication. Actually, that is not quite the nub of it. The telephone allows two-way communication. So does email. So does a discotheque. So does a hyper-trendy restaurant (though not Kazuti, because it doesn’t actually exist).

The web opens a whole world of creative opportunity on the continuum between one-way media (like TV, radio or newspapers) and two-way (telephone, email, discotheques, non-fictional restaurants).

Take Wikipedia, for example. 99.99% of the time, I use it to consume information. The other 0.01% is where the magic happens. Because you can create pages and edit them, Wikipedia blooms.

If Wikipedia was purely one-way, it would be the Encyclopaedia Britannica. If it was purely two-way, it would be a couple of people having a conversation about asphalt (or any other of Wikipedia’s 2,494,00 subjects). Wikipedia is interesting because it combines elements of both. 

Facebook, Digg, Flickr, Last.fm and pretty much every other web success combine elements of one-way publishing and two-way communication. I’m sure there are many undiscovered possibilities, some of which will prove to be wonderful new forms of mass-participation media.

Channel 4

Future-gazing pundits claim that brands will cut out the broadcasters by creating their own content, reaching customers directly. While this is happen to an increasing extent, there are areas where brands struggle.

Russell Davies gave a tremendous talk at the recent 2gether08. He said that brands typically want their message to be clear. But audiences want messages that are interesting. Interesting messages have depth, humour, irony, anger, romance, drama and ambiguity - but rarely clarity. No one ever left a cinema saying ‘I really loved that film, it was really clear’.

Channel 4 has a great track record of being interesting. Over the last 25 years, it has repeatedly commissioned projects that reflect the national mood in ways that resonate. This understanding of zeitgeist, and the willingness to play with it, is a rare and valuable asset.

What does this mean for 4IP?

The great opportunity for 4IP is to create projects that combine the participation of good websites with Channel 4’s wit and intelligence.

By way of example, here are three projects that fit this bill:
Rock Corps
Carrot Mob
TED

OK, so they have already been done by someone else. But perhaps they serve as templates of what might be possible.

It would be wonderful to make a Carrot Mob-style event that worked on a nationwide scale.

Rock Corps cleverly combines the desire to do good with the power of music. Could this structure be reworked into other new formats?

TED would never work on TV, but it is brilliant on the web. What other events could be covered in a similar way? What if an event was only covered in this way?

(Incidentally, here’s a list of interesting ideas that haven’t yet been done yet.)

One thing all these projects have in common is they encourage real-world activity. So do many of the cross-platform successes in the world of advertising, for instance Innocent Village Fete or Red Bull Flugtag. Clay Shirky points out in Here Comes Everybody that the word ‘organisation’ used to mean both ‘the people being organised’ and ‘the institution doing the organising’. Now, thanks to the web, you can organise without an organisation. I suspect many 4IP projects will grasp this opportunity and cross over into the real world.

Raise a glass to 4IP

4IP comes at a time when people are beginning to understand what is special about the web as a form of media. Channel 4 brings budget, clout and audience, as well as skills at being quirky and interesting. It could well be a killer combination.

So, if you’ll all just pitch me your ideas, I’ll commission the lot. Double VitaminWaters all round! 

One area where 4iP can invest and make a difference is in Games. Three of our key investment regions – Scotland, West Midlands and Yorkshire all have thriving games sectors, and the opportunity to work with them is a compelling new opportunity for Channel 4.

Dundee the home of companies like Real Time Networks, Denki and Dynamo Games has a strong interactive entertainment community and was the original home of Lemmings, Grand Theft Auto and Crackdown. The talent is world class.

Yorkshire is the home of the Yorkshire Republic Games Alliance and the West Midlands has growing Serious Games Sector, with strong Higher Education support in Birmingham and Coventry.

But 4iP is not about pure gaming entertainment nor should it try to replicate or compete with the existing online or console games products. The objective is to work in territory where Channel 4 has a reputation - identifying areas of creative culture, where there is a gap or failure in the market and turning that opportunity into success.

We recently launched a ‘Bow Street Runners’ Game, which took casual gaming in an unfamiliar direction, exploring crime and urban history in 19th Century London. That’s one recent example but what about other areas that have a potential fit - strategy games, interactive educational games, and even conventional public service subjects like health.

The term ‘serious games’ needs next generational thinking and beyond the games themselves there is a challenge around the users, what communities are locked out of gaming and its traditional market positioning?

This week 4iP is providing significant new investment in the already-established games prototype festival Dare to be Digital, itself a spin-out from Dundee’s Abertay University.

4iP is not about Channel 4 entering the games market but that does not mean we cannot experiment with great innovative public content via games technologies.

I’d welcome views and opinions. 

A few weeks back Tom Lubbock of the Independent newspaper wrote an article questioning whether art had run out of ideas. In it he was quite sniffy about a public art project that I worked on called The Telectroscope:

“Was it art? I thought not. I thought it was just a fascinating public amusement like the London Eye. But it turned out it was an artwork, made by a bona-fide artist called Paul St George, – a discovery that was, frankly, a disappointment.

It wasn’t just an experience that was interesting in all sorts of ways. It was going to be about something. It was going to be raising issues or asking questions. And sure enough, as St George’s website reveals, “his practice as an artist has always been concerned with questioning the relationship between the viewer and what is being viewed.” Oh no! Suddenly the whole thing got smaller.”

Tom popped up again last week on Radio 4’s Today programme (which I’ve also have worked on recently – he’s following me around!). Again he was making the case against ‘explaining’ art, and in particular highlighting the horrible guff that usually gets stuck on a piece of white card next to each exhibit in a gallery.

Having just completed my first ‘what-shall-we-do-with-the-kids-during-the-holidays’ outing to the Hayward gallery in London I must say I have some sympathy with Tom’s point of view. There really was some horrible guff being written about artworks that seemed perfectly capable of speaking for themselves.

On the other hand, as someone who is in the business of writing and producing digital materials that support and enhance public arts projects, I do feel strongly that audiences need information and insights that inspire a ‘way in’ to a work, that trigger debate and discussion and – importantly – provide a connection between what we might call ‘high’ or ‘fine’ art and our own ‘low’ noodlings at home and at school - whether it’s with paint, glue and paper or it’s digital noodlings on YouTube or Facebook et al.

If you don’t believe there is a job to do here, get this from the Arts Council formal response to Ofcom’s Second Public Service Broadcasting Review:

“Many people feel uncomfortable about trying something new in the arts, even those who are already quite involved. People are concerned that they might not enjoy it or that they might not understand it or know how to respond. Some feel that the arts are just not for people like them. They believe they wouldn’t fit in at an arts event and might be looked down on by other members of the audience.”

Pretty much all of us have felt like that at some point when going to a gallery or a theatre or a concert hall, no? 

So, yes Tom Lubbock, we do want art that can speak for itself. But that doesn’t rule out the need for information and stories that help to provide wider, broader access to that art, that help make people feel they’re part of an experience not standing outside it - and, importantly, inspire people to go away and make things, write things, create things.

In fact, isn’t that what public arts broadcasters should be using digital technologies for? 

What is the best way to fund digital innovation?  That is one of the key questions that 4iP needs to test over the next couple of years.  We are setting up 4iP with a broad remit: able to fund anything from small development grants through project funding / digital “commissions” and even equity funding in the form of seed capital.

I should declare my background at this point.  I work in Channel 4’s Corporate Development group, which focuses primarily on investment and acquisitions.  I’ve been working with “new media” businesses for about 15 years as a consultant, entrepreneur, banker and in development roles in media companies (so I’m not sure this stuff is so “new” anymore!).  All of this means that I have to admit to a bit of a “commercial” bias.

Back in 2000 the answer to funding was simple – go out, raise some VC funding, and build a business.  Of course, not all of us succeeded at that!  Even so, the basic concept of taking an idea, creating a management team, developing a business plan and taking in investment for equity is a sound idea: with a company established and a good management team, equity type financing gives the flexibility to change and adapt the business as it develops. 

In comparison, a commissioning type structure (as an example “go away and develop/deliver this particular project/piece of content”) does not give that flexibility (unless you have a very understanding project sponsor) but can act as a catalyst for a business: delivering one piece of successful content can lead to further “commissions” – think of the growth of the independent TV production sector.

With 4iP we are going to be able to experiment with many different types of funding – the critical output is that we not only deliver some great digital content and services that inspire change in people’s lives, but also that we create some innovative businesses that will go on to grow, create jobs and sustain the UK’s position in what is an increasingly global digital economy.

It’s unusual to be able to see the direct impact, in terms of actual changes of behaviour, produced by a public service interactive project but in the case of Embarrassing Bodies this has been possible. A quick trawl through the comments on the site yields such evidence (there were over 3,500 pre-moderated comments in the first four days of going fully live). The core of the project is a set of Self-check videos. What’s so innovative about that? Primarily their openness, clarity and unflinching nature - very Channel 4 and it just wasn’t out there before in the ocean of web video. They show you what you need to see to be able to do what you need to do. The most telling comments for me are the ones where people realise they’d been checking themselves wrongly before seeing the video.

Another salient component is the creation of a rolling temporary community. We never set out to build a community per se. We were also keen not to reinvent the wheel of support provision in this area. So the dynamic is that people arrive in a just-in-time, task-oriented way - looking for the condition they are worried about (through any of the three search mechanisms). They then tend to hang out in the community just long enough to find which is the best support group or other help to plug into. In this way Embarrassing Bodies online becomes the glue to pull together a wealth of existing support and enable the best to emerge through detailed personal recommendation, rather than treading on the toes of niche communities and specialised support.

One other aspect worth highlighting is the use of the private space of the mobile phone (away from browser histories and prying parental eyes etc.) to enable people to make use of the material where, when and how they want - 12,000 mobile downloads occurred in those first 4 days. My hunch, for reasons including privacy and access, is that mobiles should play a major role in 4IP - from my observation, people in our circles get too obsessed with PC-/web-based delivery.

So here’s what 15 minutes trawling the comments reveals:

“this has helped me to make my mind up and go for help thank you

Really helpfull and i now check at least once a week …. Thank-you x

watched various videos and found them very very useful. wouldn’t have felt comfortable talking about some of these subjects with my doctor. they have taken the mystery out of the examination and treatment. thank you.

i suffer from this too, and its not something you like going to the doctors about. This site has been SO HELPFUL, as i now know its not only me!!

thank god 4 this website i am so grateful. it has started 2 get me down. (…) I had tests done then chicken out on the results. seein this has made me book an appointment with my doctor. its such a relief knownin im not the only person sufferin, thankyou!!!

i found all 3 self checking very useful. we all know we should do it but not nessesary how and are too embarressed to ask our own GP. i check my breasts yet i’ve been doing it wrong the video was an ideal way to show me the basics.

Hi, i just watched this video and checked my balls and i actually found a small hard lump on my left testicle, im only 16 is there any chance it could be cancerous (sorry if the spelling is wrong)?!

Thanks so much this has been so informative. My auntie died last year from Vulval cancer, not knowing that she was suffering from it. Now I know what symptoms to look for and how to self check I will do so regularly.
[Vulva Self-check]

Although now middle aged I was never sure when you were supposed to check your breasts. Thanks to your program I now know when and how. Many thanks and keep up the good work.

My boyfriend refuses to check his balls so thanks for the guide on how to as now i can do it for him.

WOW, i never knew how to do this check, i’m so grateful for this video its helped me immensely. thankyou
[Breast Self-check]

Interestingly, my friend watched “Embarassing Illnesses” last week, and they did something on checking moles, so he checked his out and noticed one had changed colour, so he went to get it checked and it does in fact need to be removed. So these programmes do something towards awareness!

i had it but i went to the doctors and now am recovered thanks !!”

This throws up the interesting question of how does 4IP measure success and impact? Here we have evidence of positive behavioural change. For me the Comments stats are very telling. Then you’ve got video views. Return visits. UGC uploads. Session lengths. Buzz radiating across the Web. All manner of metrics. I’d argue that for most projects you can pick out a specific measure which captures the essence of the project, and which measure that is will vary from project to project.

4IP asked Ivo Gormley of thinkpublic to share some reflections on the advent of 4IP.
Ivo is currently cutting a documentary, Us Now, on the impact of the internet on government.

I recently interviewed Giles Andrews from the peer-to-peer money lending site
Zopa. He said:

“So I think we have people that deal with us purely financially… to
some it is an interesting sort of social diversion.  It is fun.  And
to others it is a philanthropic thing where we have lenders offering
money on our markets at uneconomic rates of interest… So, as far as
I am concerned, all those motivations for interacting with Zopa are
good ones but it makes it difficult to generalise and I suspect that
that is something that society is increasingly coming to terms with:
that customers don’t necessarily fit into the easy pigeon holes that
businesses and marketing departments like to think they do”

It seems that even organisations like banks are tapping into social
motivations to give them competitive advantage. Social media seems
to be changing what it means to be commercial and
this is in turn is changing the qualities of what is mainstream.
In this new version of ‘mainstream’ people’s diverse motivations and
input will play a greater role, this is something that public services
are still struggling to adapt to. I hope 4IP will help move new and
existing projects that produce public service outcomes closer to
this mainstream.

Ivo Gormley
thinkpublic

Andy Duncan (Channel 4’s CEO) was on a panel with Sir Tim Berners Lee and Charles Leadbetter at NESTA on Tuesday, at which Sir Tim’s new web science initiative research was discussed. Sir Tim’s slides are here and the video of the event is available on the NESTA site. Sir Tim later gave an interview covering everything from openness to Google and Gordon Brown to Channel 4 news which you can find on the Channel 4 news site.

The debate ranged far and wide. Sir Tim’s overall thesis was that the web had grown and developed by being free and open, but that as a result it had evolved in unexpected ways and now ought to be properly studied. He likened it to the odd tangle of things that you get when you eventually find the object that’s blocking your sink: underneath it all there’s something with a clear structure (such as a fish bone) but all sorts of accretions have collected round it. So if the web, and the interactions it supports, is to continue to thrive, its organic development needs to be better understood before its too late.

The panel discussion debated whether the first decade or so of the web’s existence has been an unsustainable aberation. Charlie’s recent reading has included a book on the English Civil War, when the Levellers challenged the existing hierarchies, only to have the monarchy restored ten years later. He identified 2Gether08 (which 4IP was part of) as a gathering of modern day Levellers, and wondered if the new ways of thinking and doing that were discussed at 2Gether would continue to flourish, or whether they too would be curtailed as governments and corporations find ways of reasserting themselves. Andy Duncan took up the same theme by highlighting the difficult trade-offs that the web is creating between freedom of speech and protection of privacy, diversity and like-mindedness, and old vs new business models. It’s these challenges which we hope to explore a bit with 4IP, by combining the lessons and scale of a broadcaster like Channel 4 with the vitality and participation of a new generation of creatives and socially minded entrepreneurs.

Perhaps the best lessons for 4IP came from the wrap up remarks from NESTA’s CEO, Jonathan Kestenbaum. He made reference to Sir Tim Berners Lee’s boss at CERN who had ‘not said no’ and created the environment in which the web could be invented. His advice for innovation initiatives, and organisations, was to commit to the journey and provide the resource, but not prescribe the outcome at the outset. That’s very much the spirit in which we’re embarking on the 4IP pilot over the next couple of years.

Sponsored by Channel 4 2gether08 featured a mix of the high brow and the homespun but all focused on emerging technologies and social progress. Tapping into and bringing together leading players in the burgeoning digital media and social entrepreneur scenes the Festival took place over two days at the splendid Rochelle School just off the historic Arnold Circus in Shoreditch East London. Over 350 passed by and nearly everyone made a contribution to the over 75 hours of content showcased at the event. One of the delegates tweeted that is was a feast of characters...megatweeting-friendgreeting-coffeedrinkinking-creativethinking-streetdancing-lifeenhancing; that just about sums it up for me. Follow the afterglow, the video highlights, twitter and flickr streams and blogs all here

For me and I think Channel 4 what really worked about 2gether was the rich mix of people who might not otherwise have met. There is a widespread recognition that for 4IP to be successful, new partnerships and relationships need to be fostered, new experimental ways of working established and barriers bewteen traditional definitions of audience and producers overcome. In this context 2gether08 was a great start to a new era for Channel 4.

Here’s to 2gether09

Steve Moore

One of 4iP’s launch ideas is to make small investments in entirely independent self-standing concepts. It is branded ‘Powered by 4’ and the idea is to break with the conventional wisdom of traditional TV broadcasting, which is largely based on ‘control’ of limited spectrum. The 4iP Fund will support up to 30 independent web sites, offering innovative or public service content to audiences.

Subjects can range widely from parenting to public health, culture to community, and from data mining to democracy.  The objective is to support independent practice on new platforms to bring more visibility, increased traffic and in some cases greater resource, by investing in cash, and/or platform prominence.  Any proposed ideas or compelling sites let me know?

I’m also keen to get feed-back on this strand of activity.Advice, comment, passion or criticism are all equally welcome. It strikes me there is a really important issue at the heart of this - how should established media organisations assist independent practice? Is it through direct funding, marketing or maybe by keeping the hell out?

TV has a long track record of muscling in on independent activity, whether its the lives of individuals, small communities or micro-societies. But equally there is a history of media companies being a catalyst for public change too. I’d welcome views, opinion and a register of interest, however diverse.

Stuart Cosgrove
4iP Team

People discussing, presenting and developing ideas in sessions at the 2gether08 festival of ideas this week will have an ideal opportunity to explore the value of engaging with 4IP.

In a video interview for the 2gether08 website, Jon Gisby, Channel 4 Director of New Media and Technology, explained the thinking behind 4IP and said he was looking forward to hearing from people who “are looking to make a social difference and solve interesting problems - and do that on a new platform.”

Channel 4 invites ideas for funding from David Wilcox on Vimeo.

On the same website, Stuart Cosgrove, Channel 4 Director of Nations and Regions, has spoken of 4IP as “probably one of the biggest single interventions in publicly useful social media in Britain.”

The audience as participants from David Wilcox on Vimeo.

“We want things that are challenging, we want things that connect to a bigger wider audience of people” added Cosgrove.

“We don’t want to be making merely niche media for its own sake. We want to have an impact, and that impact means that people will feel fired up. But of course firing people’s imagination means you have to touch their soul, their hearts, their creative juices - you have to make them part of the story.”

Great Minds Think Differently

Reflecting 4IP’s commitment to partnership, we want to involve experts with a wide range of relevant experience to help us shape the 4IP pilot. We are therefore announcing the 4IP ThinkTank.

The ThinkTank will comprise a range of people from various backgrounds and with particular areas of expertise and experience related to the 4IP project. These could include finance and venture capital, new media start-ups, social entrepreneurship, technology and platform innovation, and experience of working with public finance partners. We also hope it will include people who are inspired by what we’re setting out to do: creating new and sustainable ways of delivering public service media for a post-broadcast world.

The objective of the ThinkTank is to provide expertise and insight into the projects that 4IP is backing and to help share the lessons we learn with a wider audience. (Its role will not be to decide which projects we back, or how they are funded.)

If you feel you have the experience, expertise and drive to contribute and would like to be considered as a member of the 4IP ThinkTank, please email, in the first instance, up to 200 words capturing why you are interested and what you’d be bringing to the project to:

4IP has announced a partnership programme that should allow just about any organisation to join the 4IP network at some level, as long as it has proven itself to be ambitious, innovative and sympathetic to the principles of the 4IP fund.

If you’d like to discuss how your organisation can get involved, drop us a line at .

The four main levels of partnership are:

Global media partners: Channel 4 is already in dialogue with international platform partners (such as Google and Bebo).

Regional development partners:  to date a range of key regional partners have signed up or expressed interest, in areas such as the North East, the South West and Northern Ireland.

Strand partners: this is centred on arts, science and public service bodies that may wish to pursue a particular strand of 4IP-supported activity.

Project partners: these are either commercial companies/brands or public sector bodies that may wish to join the fund on a project-by-project basis as ideas, concepts and platforms emerge.