Northern Lights and the “multiplaform” buzzword
From February to March of 2009, twitter doubled its traffic from 7 million hits, to more than 14 million. It’s now leveled off at a cool 23 million unique visitors a month. Mashable estimate that Facebook are gaining 500,000 new users every single day. But most staggering of all is Apple, who announced in September that their app store contained more than 85,000 apps. Just over a month later and there are more than 100,000, put another way, if you’re going to release an iPhone app tomorrow you’ll be competing for attention with 500 brand new apps.
Oh, and there’s there seemingly inconsequential fact that there has now been more than 2 billion app downloads. Yes, billion with a B. That’s 23,500 downloads for every single application in the App store – solid evidence that this acceleration isn’t going to slow for anyone.
Whilst the digital world accelerates to light speed, television doesn’t seem to have a clue what to do while viewing figures decline. Even when we do watch their content, we’re fast-forwarding through their adverts with Sky+ and Tivo. That relentless technological march forward has left Murdoch’s machine scratching their prospective head and thinking “What the hell are we going to do”? It seems they’ve cooked up the perfect answer – remove their websites from Google.
Clearly the Murdoch machine don’t have a clue what’s going 0n. The print industry are in free fall and people in suits are starting to throw their toys out of the cot. There’s a distinct “what the fuck” feeling rippling out from the epicentre of content production and a curious thing has begun to happen. Those people who wouldn’t give you a job, those people who put your CV in the bin, the people who made you make coffee, and the people who were half cut whilst they broadcast the news are now removing their head from their arse and looking at us lot for answers. The smartest ones are anyway; the stupid ones are enjoying the stench of their own bullshit about their latest ITV quiz show.
If there’s one person to really pay attention to right now, it’s Eric Schmidt – the business brains behind the Google empire. What’s he saying? Despite the break neck pace of online development over the last five years, we’re nowhere close to equilibrium so expect the content/digital world to look completely different in five years from now.
“Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance – and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.”
From the media industry’s position, the word “multiplatform content” has been tagged onto anything that might work online, but from a typical bloggers perspective content is content. “Multiplatform content” is a transitional phrase destined to be meaningless in less than a years time. All platforms will have online access so distinction will no doubt disappear.
That seems to be the message coming from the Multiplatform training course Northern Lights, which I’ve been part of for the last two weeks. To my knowledge it’s the only course in the country anywhere close to the pace of change in content creation. It’s designed to take people from being wide-eyed University graduates to digital ninjas with the vision and skills to create content that works across all mediums. The people running this course, Moira Kean and Andrew Thomas, know all too well the speed at which things are changing, and with that in mind they’ve made change a key part of the course. Multiplatform, multiplatform, multiplatform.
We’ve heard the BBC’s development plans – they have very little to worry about even in these fast moving times, their research and development team are trend setters rather than trend followers. We’ve spent time with Mando group, a leading North West digital agency, and we’ll soon be spending time at Made in Manchester Radio and Milky Tea. That’s TV, Radio, Digital and Gaming all covered in one intense course, there’s no doubt that the people taking part are very lucky to have been chosen.
The one message that seems to be recurring as we explore and critique the world of content is this – now is the time to invent. If you’re copying the trend that someone else started you’re behind the times and moving too slow. Listen to the youngest of your workforce because in a strange twist of fate they probably know more than you do. If you have an idea, make it right now or soon enough someone else will do it and you’ll be left with a vacuous hole where your idea could have been great.
“We had that idea a few weeks ago didn’t we?”
This the conversation you and your business need to avoid at all costs. If it’s a good idea now, it won’t be a good idea by the end of the month, so get making.