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Workshop B
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Workshop A |
Workshop B |
Workshop C |
Workshop D
Workshop B - Session 2
Nick Corner-Calder is the General Manager of the Discovery Channel which of course is now the world's premier information and education channel. Discovery is a multi-national multi-media company. It is US-owned. It is for profit. It runs a number of networks, the best known of which perhaps is the Discovery Channel. It also runs the Learning Channel. It has an award winning on-line site. It publishes CD-ROMs and videos. It has a number of retail outlets in America. In America it has 72 million subscribers, which is 90% plus of all television homes. Across the world we have 150 million subscribers. There are 17 million in Europe, 7 of those in the UK. We are the world's largest producer of original factual programming. We have a partnership with the BBC that we signed, a world-wide partnership that was signed quite recently to launch channels and to produce programming together. We have been going for 12 years in the US, 10 years in Europe. We make our money by getting subscriptions and also by selling advertising; but we are very much a public service broadcaster. Our mission is broadly defined by our founder John Hendricks as 'to satisfy people's lifelong curiosity in whatever form that takes for whatever mood they are in at any particular time.' Seminal Role In the US, where the provision of educational television is pretty minimal, Discovery has had a seminal role. It is heavily involved in cable in the classroom; it set up a separate educational on-line site. World-wide we have just established a foundation which is involved in something called the African Educational Initiative. We in Discovery Europe are also involved in South Africa. We are involved in promoting new talent down there. We have just commissioned 6 programmes from new film makers. In the UK we are major sponsors of the Royal Geographical Society. We are deeply involved in the Natural History Museum and in a number of media colleges where our staff teach on a part-time basis. We are educative rather than educational. We have a very generalist, unashamedly entertainment driven, perspective. By and large, I think we have grown up in Europe regarding television as an entertainment medium first of all, and only as an educational medium second. There are two stories to tell about our involvement in educational television. I joined the organisation to launch something called the Learning Channel and when it first launched on cable we had one hour which was for Social and Health programming, very straight down the line public service social issue programming. It died a death. Nobody watched it. The message very clearly from all our research was: it is not working, get rid of it, I do not like it. So we did. Then we discovered that people do not really like the name 'learning' either because viewers do not want to feel they are being educated when they watch television. They want informative programming but they do not like being seen learning, as learning is for children. So we started calling our channel TLC and eventually a year later we re-named it as 'Discovery Home and Leisure'. From qualitative research we have done we have found very much the same message: that people who do not watch Discovery are saying, 'We watch television for entertainment. We are interested in high quality informational television, but please do not say it is a documentary, let alone learning. Documentary is boring; that is a boring word; we do not like that word. If asked, we would not say we watched documentary programming. We watch programming about natural history. We watch programming about science. We do not watch documentaries. We do not really like the word 'factual'. It is just television and it is a certain kind of television which is good for us and we appreciate it, but not learning and not educational.' It is another big challenge we face in all of these initiatives. The Consumer So to what extent should we at Discovery be consumer driven? From the knowledge I have of television viewers in general and Discovery viewers in particular, there is not a huge pent-up demand. People are not queuing up for more educational television. They are queuing up for more entertainment television and in fact there is a nasty tendency towards the dumbing down of television particularly in the UK. This is the challenge: are we trying to create a demand? There are people who are active learners who want learning television. However, most people are not active learners and if you are not, you do not want it. So it seems that we have to tease them out of the network. The other thing is: what time scale are we talking about here? There is a lot of talk about digital. The most ambitious projections estimate about 3 million people will have digital television by 2003. So by 2005, it will not be in a majority of homes. The homes that we are most interested in, the less well heeled, the more deprived areas, will not have it. How do we tackle those people? That is a major issue. I think talking digital has to be seen in terms of the time frame. We have to be careful about not piling huge amounts of resources into a medium which will not be accessible to most people until 2005 plus. Then what can we do, what can Discovery do? I think possibly one of the things we should be doing is looking actively at partnerships, either with the BBC or with Channel 4 or indeed why not with all of us. For a long time, I have argued the fact that education is not a competitive medium, but should be a collaborative area and that no one broadcaster should try and separate themselves and maximise their political 'brownie points' by being the dominant player. It is an area where everybody should co-operate and indeed there have been many examples where people have done that, where the BBC and Channel 4 and ourselves on occasion have been involved in initiatives.
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