Guardian columnist David Liddiment, former ITV director of programming, reveals perhaps more than he intended about the blinkered outlook of his generation of UK TV execs in his final column today.
Looking back to when he began writing his column in October 2002, he remarks that, way back then, "broadband was still something BT boffins talked about at Royal Television Society conventions, and no one had ever heard of user-generated content."
In fact, of course, fast Internet access was a well-established reality by then, although penetration was rather higher outside the UK. At the time, I had just returned from a field-trip to the US, where broadband take-up stood at 10%.
All the talk there, in fact, was of the coming boom in user-generated content, and my subsequent presentation to the clients who had funded the research contained this phrase: "As bandwidth becomes available, many forecast an explosion of material in this space. [...] The cultural imperative to document your life is taking root in the US."
This wasn't a particularly original observation, and anyone taking an interest in technologically-related consumer developments outside these shores would have said as much. Rather startling that Liddiment appears to have been blithely oblivious to all of this at the time. Then again, given the downwards trajectory ITV has followed over the last four years, perhaps not?
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