What Brexit means for the broadcast industry
The one where I manage to write about Brexit without explicitly saying how stupid it is…
One of the nice things about a long-term content marketing gig is that you can occasionally foray into areas of general industry interest. And so when the team at VO said they would be interested in some analysis of what Brexit meant for the industry, I jumped at the chance.
The main challenge was to keep politics out of it on their blog pages - something that’s already been reached and breached here - while providing a framework so that people outside the UK, who might not be quite so involved in the minutiae of it all, could understand what some of the issues were. Some of that had to be offloaded onto links for reasons of space, as fully unpacking issues such as the Irish border would take up an entire post and more on their own. Some of the resulting analysis is quite interesting though, especially the way that the government advice has changed in recent years; almost as if no-one had a clue what this big exciting leap in to the unfettered unknown really meant.
Anyway, here’s a snippet. Will eventually host the whole thing here I expect but always nice to give a client an uptick in traffic.
On 16th October, with the latest Halloween Brexit deadline looming large, Sky News launched a new pop-up channel, ‘Sky News Brexit-Free’ offering a primetime news source without any of the Brexit content that was dominating the mainstream agenda.
“A study released this summer found that a third of people are avoiding the news entirely,” the broadcaster said in a statement. “More than 70% of them blamed Brexit, saying they were too frustrated over the political debate surrounding it.”
In the end events overtook the channel (very briefly the government failed in its attempt to get the bill through parliament, there is a general election to be held on 12 December, and the latest Brexit deadline has been pushed back to 31 January 2020).
But the broadcast industry will probably sympathise with the frustration evident in the survey. Political viewpoints aside — and in the language of Brexit, the media industry is a staunch ‘Remainer’ with 67% saying they wanted to stay within the EU before the referendum was held — the tumult and uncertainty caused by the ongoing process has at the very least been bad for business.
And given the UK’s prominent role in European OTT in particular, that’s having lots of ramifications. In 2017 the UK was classed as the leading European OTT hub, with 82 of its 226 OTT services targeted abroad, twice the number of any other nation. The picture two years on is very different.
Read the whole thing here: What Brexit means for European OTT services and broadcast
