Open Media Content

PSP creative forum

To explore the creative potential of a Public Service Publisher we need to look at what it might do - the content and services that it might bring into being and how these will touch the lives of citizens and contribute to public culture. It is hard to describe any new organisation and even harder if the PSP is thought of as a challenge to our cherished system of Public Service Broadcasting. But the needs and behaviours of citizen/users in the first decade of the 21st century are different to those of viewer-consumers in the last decades of the 20th century.

The ideas presented here are the output of the PSP Creative Forum - a series of creative workshops and dialogues facilitated by OFCOM during 2006. The Forum wanted to ask what would such an organisation make, how would it benefit citizen/users and to start to define the Public Service Values that would underpin its outputs. The contributors were asked to think about creative potential and outputs rather than structure or organisation; all were leading contributors and innovators in the exciting territory where digital media and public service meet. We aren't attempting to be definitive or comprehensive but to provide glimpses of future potential that will open up a dialogue which others will explore.

The overriding feeling of the participants was that the UK needs something like the PSP sooner rather than later. We need it to develop a coherent vision of public service values and content in a networked world. Should such a uniquely British organisation be created then, just like Channel 4 in the early 80s, it would call into being a new wave of creative businesses that would serve the UK well in the changing media landscape. As one participant said, "what we see now are the equivalents of the 19th century end-of-the-pier zoetropes and nickelodeons, but somewhere in there is the new cinema".

It is clear that networked and digital media driven by user participation are now at the heart of our culture. Audience consumption of audio-visual media is changing with a steady drift from linear programmed media like conventional TV towards not only online and on-demand media but to other interactive and participative experiences. Rather than abandoning the concept of Public Service as the broadcast model changes, this shift to interactive media offers the opportunity to revitalise our concept of Public Service for these new and active users rather than just to support the viewing habits of the past.

Users of interactive services behave differently from television viewers; they want different things. The distinction between 'lean forward' and 'lean back' media captures an essential quality - users approach a website with an active purpose in mind - be it to find content and information or to participate or contribute.

In recent years the UK has been recognised in many global awards for excellence and innovation in rich media public content on the web. A wealth of PSP-like content is Already Out There in embryonic form, but until now these projects have been isolated examples of creative excellence, subject to stop-start discretionary funding and not shaped by any coherent or strategic vision of the nature of public service content. One of the PSP's roles will be to take these prototypes, explore which can work and how they can scale and deliver a coordinated strategy for sustainable public service interactive content.

With a thriving creative community of independent production companies, interactive writers and digital artists, web-enabled public organisations and design agencies that now employ more people than the broadcast TV sector, with a strategic intervention like the PSP, the UK clearly has the talent base to capitalise on this dynamic new sector of the creative economy.

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