We have lift off!

It’s been a while since our last blog and while there’s really no excuse for that, we have been getting ready for Outdoors TV to go live over the last three months, so time has been a little tight.

Now, we are live but in case you were expecting some kind of big launch…..sorry! We did think about having a stand at the Outdoors Show & announcing the arrival of Outdoors TV to the world with a splash but that would have consumed valuable resources & taken them away from programme making.

Also, it is fundamental to our plans for Outdoors TV that it grows organically & sustainably, so we’re not making a huge song & dance to get lots of viewers in straight away. Over time, outdoors people will come to know about the channel because of our programmes & that’s good enough for us.

There is something of a rule of thumb on the internet that catching high volume passing traffic is the only way to success. We don’t fully sign up to that theory although we do understand how it came about.

If you’re surfing, or searching for information (the thing the internet has been used for predominantly over the years) you are a transitory visitor to a site – there for a fleeting moment unless you find exactly what you are looking for.

The accepted view is that internet users are somehow like the cash flying around in Noel Edmunds’ ‘Grab a Grand’ pod – you have a very short period of time in which to grab as many viewers as possible before they move on to something new.

This may be a good approach if you have set up a site to try & sell advertising around your visitor stats & then need content to get as many people to view your pages as possible but, for us, the internet is simply a delivery channel, a means of delivering programming to a specialist audience.

We believe that in the longer term, the internet will change significantly & become THE dominant delivery medium for TV, music, films, pictures & the written word. Yes, information dissemination will continue to be a major function but over time, the emphasis will shift more towards multi-media content delivery.

In ten, maybe twenty years time, we will look upon the internet in the same way we look at terrestrial & satellite TV or radio – we’ll just take it for granted, not thinking that it somehow provides something different, special or supplementary. After all, you don’t sit down on the sofa & say to your family, “I’m just going on the satellite for a bit”. The internet will just be the technical function used to give you what you want, just as the airwaves or satellite signals are today.

So what has all this got to do with Outdoors TV? Well, we’ve seen the future & are skipping all this ‘catch up service’ bunkum! We’re jumping straight to the place in history where the TV schedule has been extinct for years & viewers can just watch programmes on any device, when it suits them, as with BT Vision or Apple TV.

We’re going straight to the place where TV channels no longer promote additional online features as something special but where those ‘additional features’ are actually the benchmark for television provision. No more token ‘interactive’ red button services or catching up on the ‘iPlayer’. The red button or ‘iPlayer’ services are the way that TV actually works, period.

Why should viewers, having experienced the convenience of watching material on the ‘iPlayer’ for instance, actually want to return to scheduled programming, which is the television equivalent of having the central heating on full with all your windows open?

Of course, the death of TV schedules in favour of a more viewer friendly programme selector menu (the kind of which we use for Outdoors TV), doesn’t work for mainstream broadcasters because they lose control over what the audience watches.

But we’re not scared of putting control in the hands of our viewers. We have to run the channel as a commercial entity & that means advertising & sponsorship but it doesn’t mean we need to try & manipulate our audience. We know that if we simply work hard to make interesting programmes, people will watch – it’s as simple as that. So instead of trying to find clever ways to get people to develop or change habits in order to make money, we’re just going to give them what they want!

Time spent watching programmes is time lost in the outdoors (even after dark), so we made a decision from the start that for Outdoors TV, the model will always be ‘on demand television’. If only the mainstream TV industry would follow the same method, we could probably lose all of the channels showing regurgitated material & viewers would have fewer reasons to plant themselves on the sofa & more reasons to get active!

We’re not saying our way is the only way or that we’ve got it absolutely right (time will be the judge of that) but we do think that TV should be a supplementary form of entertainment for those moments when you have nothing better to do, not a replacement for life itself. TV should serve the audience, not the other way around & we’ll be working very hard to make sure that’s exactly what Outdoors TV does!