There are occasions on which the name of a speaker is more instructive than the detail of what he or she has to say. It is no disrespect to Eric Schmidt's thoughtful MacTaggart lecture last night to observe that it was one. The very fact of a computing engineer delivering the leading address in the television industry calendar is proof of change. A medium that once swept all before it is coming to recognise that its future is tangled up with the web.
Google's executive chair reaffirmed the revolution confronting his audience. Every passing month, he reported, more video footage is uploaded to the web than all three big US networks have broadcast in the last 60 years. Although more hours are still passed watching the old-fashioned box, the rapid take-up of on-demand viewing is, as The Wire's writer has said, replacing the old idea of TV as a run of appointments, with television as lending library. Mr Schmidt persuasively argued these changing patterns of production and consumption would profoundly affect every aspect of the business, from crafting scripts to hunting out talent. His call to train and empower more technicians resonated. Likewise Google's take on copyright is adroit. Rights were not carved in granite by God. Rather, they embody a social compromise, a compromise which will necessarily evolve with technology.
On the question of paying the bills the man from Google had more convincing to do. For all its glamour, television is an industry with interests, like any other. Sky subscriptions may be buoyant and ITV may have clambered out of the ditch, but it is not for nothing that media execs mutter about a certain tech giant bowling them googlies. In the crude economics, commercial programmes are (arguably like newsprint) interesting froth atop a less-airy advertising business. Google is not itself in TV, as Mr Schmidt said, but it sure is in advertising.
The merchant John Wanamaker once moaned half his ad budget was wasted; his difficulty was that he didn't know which half. Google's brilliance has been in harnessing technology to allow advertisers to refine their efforts. More targeted commercials are efficient, but they also drain the pool that has always cross-subsidised what is now called content. Thanks to the web, good television can reach more people than ever, but that does not guarantee that the free market will fund quality. It has been sustained in Britain by a complex ecology which features both a BBC license fee and considerable regulation.
This ecology will have to evolve with the times. But just as TV must reconceive its work in the face of technology, tech giants have thinking to do about the role that they can play in sustaining the habitat of creativity.
