Mobisodes
ITV is producing short features for mobile phones. Nothing new there but I'm interested in the thought that content is produced exclusively for mobile phones and for that particular setting.
It seems to me that media content is invariably "repurposed" - this is a way of crudely repackaging the same old content for another time and place. Repurposing, repeating, selling-on whatever you would like to call it, is prevalent in the media world. The cost of producing good TV is high and the number of channels now so vast that producing content for a single service is almost unheard of. Here, at least, the ITV show is an attempt to produce something specifically for a single context.
The BBC has cut its news costs by repurposing media to a large degree. A while back a respected BBC correspondent who told me he was moving to newsreading because reporting had become a multi outlet production line. He told me that he'd spent so much of his time in the field reporting he didn't have enough time to find out what was going on; at least that was the gist of it.
It will be interesting to see how innovative broadcasters can be in developing cost effective formats for single outlets. The encouraging thing from a creative point of view is that the producers will be less reliant on production values and more dependent on great ideas. My criticism of the ITV example is that it has gone down the old route of using celebrity - if you haven't got a good programme idea, there's always a celebrity to fall back on. There are 140 Hotdesk mobisodes interviews lined up apparently.
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