What happened when I went into Parliament to give evidence!

So yesterday I was invited to attend the House of Lords committee on the impact of technology on the creative industries. If you're wondering what I said, here's a brief summary:

Firstly, predicting technology is impossible, anyone who claims to know the future in absolutes has confidence beyond competence (sorry not sorry if that dents any tech-bro egos!) But we can project historic trends, which I have tried my hardest to focus on rather than making sweeping judgments.

My take on the big picture is that for businesses, creative technology broadly falls into two sectors:

1. Technology for creating content
2. Technology for monetising content

Content Creation Technology

For content creation, tech has helped the project management holy trinity of speed-cost-quality. Processors have got faster, whilst getting cheaper, therefore allowing higher quality content to be made.

?But this has a knock-on effect of being more accessible, so we are now seeing individual, young, content creators making content that only Hollywood studios with millions spent on technology would have been capable of, which creates immense opportunity for individuals and businesses, whilst progressing social mobility and ethnic diversity.

?The problem lies with knowledge gaps throughout the talent pipeline, starting at school, that these careers even exist. It’s a game changer that Python is now part of the national curriculum, but DOA if the students can’t relate it to their own passions, unbeknownst to them, such as film and TV production (i.e. all VFX are built on Python code). Technical Artists are rare things to find, which is throttling growth (I left it to my colleagues to evidence the tech sector hoovering up talent from the creative industries).

One constant theme of the inquiry was AI. This technology will greatly facilitate content creation too, but critically AI is less equipped at understanding?the human nuance of stories, characters and worlds that truly resonate with audiences. And that is what the UK excels at; ideating and directing world-class IP on a very human level that is uniquely engaging.

Content Monetising Technology

So broadly speaking, when I say "monetising technology", I mean reaching audiences.

From the days when there were just a handful of channels, audience fragmentation has occurred at an exponential speed. This means that whilst reaching huge, worldwide audiences should be easier than ever, in reality, it’s the opposite. This is due to the signal-to-noise ratio of modern media, where ease of access makes it harder to be heard.?

This also creates additional problems, where companies are slaves to the data. This creates concerns regarding businesses that blindly chase profitably. As the media world quickly descends into click-bait, eye-candy dopamine addiction machines, where watch-time trumps quality, we need to ensure we're not forfeiting our morals and standards that got the UK to where it is, in creative excellence. Give a child a bowl of sweets and they will consume them all; what they need versus what they want are two very different things.

We also have to be careful of chasing shiny unicorns, we risk a huge opportunity cost being transfixed by talk of immersive media and metaverses, when the post-covid world of Zoom fatigue has taught us humans are social creatures, craving real, face-to-face contact, not digital abstractions that tax the brain and eyeballs. There are many successful companies in this space with real purpose, but we need everything in moderation, not driven by hype chasing short-term profits.

Publicly Funded Organisations Utilising New Technology

We were asked to give our thoughts on what publicly funded organisations can learn from the private sector. My response was they should be innovating and collaborating with the private sector, in open ways that shareholder-driven companies can’t. They should not be imitating what the private sector is doing, in publicly funded, closed corporate silos.

?A case in point is the BBC, which should be trusted to build and engage audiences via every tech platform to as many eyeballs as possible, to embrace true public service values in ways that the private sector can’t. Rather than seeing the private sector as competition.

So What Changes Do We Want From Government?

It’s all well and good complaining about the state of the world, but we need to drive change, not sit back and angrily spectate. So I proposed these distinct, realistic requests:

1. Encourage innovation for the creative industries, not just tech industries. By continuing funds like the YAC fund, and open patent / R&D initiatives to include creative IP development
2. Apprenticeships need to work for SMEs, which form the majority of the creative industries. At the moment small companies struggle to hire apprentices. There has been ￡3bn of surplus cash in the apprentice levy fund, this should be used to facilitate SMEs and career knowledge gaps in schools.
3. Modernise the BBC to be a Public Service Content creator, which is providing added value that the private sector can’t, rather than replicating the private sector with public money.
4. Exiting the EU has caused immense problems for the creative industries from skills migration to creative grants. But the EU also capped creative tax relief to 80% of core expenditure, so now this cap can be lifted, encouraging more inward investment into the UK. If there is a Brexit dividend, let's use it!

Shout out to Phil Attfield , Neil Hatton , and Oli Hyatt MBE who helped circle in on some of the above points!