James Murdoch sprang a surprise on some of his rival executives yesterday afternoon: they got to meet the viewers. Yes, that's right, a coachload of real people from the Cambridge area was disgorged on the conference centre, having been recruited with the promise of £85 and the once-in-a-lifetime chance to meet Thommo, Gradey, Andy Duncan et al.
Apparently this wasn't such a culture shock for the execs - Mark Thompson, for instance, recently travelled incognito to the Shetland Islands to spend time with a family of viewers.
Journalists were allowed to join in with the RTS equivalent of speed dating, as delegates spent 15 minutes each with four different viewers. The delegates then got together in a huddle and were asked to provide feedback on their conversations. Protocol prevents me from quoting anyone directly, but a few interesting themes emerged, albeit from such a small sample.
I was struck by one woman who never watches terrestrial channels and mostly just downloads shows from the internet for nothing. She insisted what she was doing was legal and saw no issue with the fact she paid nothing for content, either by sitting through ads or paying any subscription fee. She clearly thought I was a bit naive for shelling out for DVD box sets and rather prim for arguing that content has to be funded somehow.
The delegates agreed that the difficulty of persuading people to pay for anything in the future is a threat to the industry's ability to fund high-quality programming. A lot of people don't like the licence fee and don't really understand how it funds the BBC, they don't like ads and do what they can to skip them, and they don't really like the idea of subscription.
Another worry for British programme-makers is the dominance of what one exec called "American narrative". Most of the shows that people were enthused by, in drama at least, are US-made. Frankly, it's because they're better, the delegates agreed. One possible conclusion to draw from that: we in Britain should make fewer programmes and make them better, and we should drop the obsession with channels and scheduling, because that's eroding rapidly in importance. And the BBC should articulate its case for the licence fee better to the people who pay it and increasingly seem to resent it.
One less troubling theme: trust seems to be much less of an issue than newspaper headlines about a "public outcry" might have suggested. In fact broadcasters seem to be retaining a reputation above newspapers for providing reliable information.
This morning the results of the survey were relayed to the conference chamber by BSkyB's director of marketing strategy, Danny Russell. Many of the findings tallied with what came out of the session I was involved in. Delegates reported an extraordinary breadth of interest among viewers. They were also surprised to find broadcasters are still trusted, especially the BBC. The licence fee attracted "extreme" views, both positive and negative. And many viewers think TV has got better in the past 10 years. Sky was seen as "less trusted" after its high-profile row with Virgin Media. Delegates also reported how little people knew or cared about channels and that awareness of digital switchover remained surprisingly low.
