Speaker 1: from London, Mr. Bennet.

Speaker 2: Where's the audience? Come back, all of you, come back, sit down. Come, come in, come in. So. I'll start anyway. My name is Rob and I feel a bit of an imposter at the court of Prince Print today because I've spent a whole career, not in print journalism, but in television journalism. But I am a journalist. In fact, I thought the men here, how many of you saw that diagram of the Limburger as it used to be and thought of yourselves? I am that middle-aged man who's slightly dusty and I don't drive an old Volkswagen, but I drive a very battered Volvo. So that was us, men. But I think the paper is very smart now. So I'm here to give you a little walk around the question of video, video for print, video for journalism and video, digital video channels. So if you want to, you can think of it as an afternoon at the movies. So. My company's called DMA Media and we have a long history in launching news channels, everything from small digital channels to full-scale news channels all over the world. We've launched dozens of news channels in different countries, the Middle East, Asia, Europe, America, China, and our management team is from big news media brands like CNN, CNBC, Sky, the BBC. But we're also experts in digital transformation. So we help brands, companies, publications and publishers move from print or online into video. And we acquired a company called The News Market, which is a distribution platform for video and allows companies and influencers to contact a network of registered journalists, 36,000 journalists around the world looking at our content. So I just wanted to start off by saying that news channels, full-scale news channels with all the bells and whistles, have never been cheaper or easier to make. I'm not suggesting that we all make a news channel this afternoon, but it's cheaper, it's easier. The technology is simpler. You can get pictures back from more places. You can edit in the camera. You can do anything you like. And in many markets, there is an explosion of news channels. In the more developing markets, there's an explosion of news channels. So, for instance, one of the countries that we hear about and which is very underserved for news channels is Iran. It's got a very tightly state-controlled broadcasting sector and there are three or four external news channels beaming in on satellite. So we were approached by a private consortium who wanted to do a news channel for Iran to try and bring them objective news, and it's called Iran International. And I'll just show you a clip of what we did. We built it in just over a month to get it on air, and we've developed it over the last year from the soft launch to a hard launch a couple of months ago, and it's a year old now. So I'll just play you the video.

Speaker 1: Iran International is a news channel broadcasting in Persian, and it's aimed at the general public in Iran with a particular focus on the younger generation. We try to bring them news from Iran and the world with a lot of analysis and background information. News dominates our output, but we also do documentaries and also talk shows.

Speaker 3: We were brought in in April of 2017. The goal was more ambitious than most of the channels that we've done. We had to be on air by May 19th, which was the Iranian presidential elections, and we just made it. We were on air May 18th.

Speaker 1: It was a challenge, still a challenge, but one that we overcame with the AMA's help.

Speaker 3: We had to get the team together. We had to get them all trained to the same standard. We had help on the technical side, but when we launched, we were in a temporary facility, and then after launch, we needed to move to version two. We did all of that while we were bringing on new staff members, and then as soon as we'd solidified that, we moved on to version three, again in a different location with different workflows, but we're finally bedded down now.

Speaker 4: I was here from the beginning. As you can see, we have grown. We took like baby steps maybe, but I can see further down the line there would be something magnificent.

Speaker 1: Without DMA, we couldn't have Iran International. From the moment that the idea was born, and they helped develop the idea from the stage of recruitment of staff to technical support, to training, to editorial guidelines, what DMA actually did was make all this happen.

Speaker 3: I think that the achievement of the team is remarkable, really, and I don't just mean the DMA team. I mean all of the Iranians that we've been working with. I think it's amazing what they've managed to accomplish in just a year.

Speaker 2: So what you'll be asking is, yes, well, that would be a very nice thing to have, but how much would it cost? And you know, you can have one for about 40, 50 million euros. The real question is, what are the lessons of those big news channels for big brands that want to move into video? And I want to just drill down a bit into the questions around video. I mean, obviously, you will all have thought about, many of you are working with video, even though you're from very established, mature print publications in very mature markets. And you'll all have thought, how do we get our content seen? You'll all have thought, what are the costs of the kit? Do we have the right skill sets in-house? And how do we create the right kind of content? And are there money streams? Are there revenue streams around it? And I mean, I think the answer to that is, you can do it again, like the big channels, you can do it more easily now than you ever can, but you have to be quite focused on audiences and niches, as you would be in a print publication. So we think that digital channels might be a good solution. So what is a digital channel? How does a digital channel differ from, for instance, just a website? Well, a digital channel is led by video. It's video-rich, usually niche content. So it's not a broad-based news channel, it's niche content, specialist content. Topical, it has to be topical. It would be following, if you're a weekly or a daily publication, it would want to follow that. It takes a multi-channel approach, so it covers obviously the web, obviously social media, but also, and obviously smartphones, but also smart TVs. Increasingly, we all know that people are watching TV in a much more on-demand way now. So as TV viewing becomes more on-demand, people are turning to niche content on smart TVs. So the great advantage of a niche channel is its broadcast TV quality, but because it's not linear like a 24-hour news channel would be, it doesn't carry the same costs. You don't have to pay an anchor to be there at three o'clock in the morning, for instance. So digital channels bring you to new global audiences. Obviously, you can reach out beyond your own particular territory or market. They appeal to a younger and more engaged audience. We know that the audience for television is growing even older than those dusty middle-aged men like me who were the Limburger before Sketch. It's the average age of the CNN audience is 60, the average age of BBC News audience is 62, the average age of the Sky News audience is in the 60s. These are getting older all the time. A digital niche channel will obviously push you much lower down the age range. The other advantage with it is that it's scalable, so you can start off with a relatively small amount of video content and increase it, and you might want to increase it to a full-scale linear channel at some point if you wanted to. Last but not least for publishers and owners, it has the ability to bring in different revenue streams from the core publication. So I'll have more on that in a minute, but a lot of people say, well, why don't we just use YouTube and Facebook? Well, why would you use Facebook and YouTube? You are alongside goodness knows what, maybe fake news even. It's hard to monetize a Facebook and YouTube audience. The great advantage of a digital niche channel that you own is you own the data, you totally own the positioning, and you own the content. Of course you would use YouTube and Facebook to market yourselves and put the content out there to make people understand and see it, but you'd still want your core channel run by yourselves. So the Sunday Times newspaper in Britain has recently launched what they call the Style Play channel. This is a digital niche video channel about style, launched recently, and interestingly, they took the videos from outside, as you know, the Times and the Sunday Times are behind a paywall. They took the videos out of the paywall, and they've got all the content sponsored by major fashion brands, makeup brands, and so on. They have tutorials, they have video exclusive interviews, and they focus on a quality audience rather than total number of clicks. And it's working very well for them, and they are opening up revenue streams that they didn't have for the core publication. So that's a good case study. Now, we are never to be timid about taking a risk in my company. So we are putting our money where our mouths are and launching our own digital niche channel in July. It's called Photography Now, and it's a major partnership between a European publisher, I can't tell you the name of the publisher, but it's a household name, and DMA, the parent company of the news market. And we are taking a lot of photography archive and how-to video material, curating it, producing it, presenting it as a digital niche channel. This particular one is a subscription model, so you would subscribe to the content, and you would get access to the channel. They don't all have to be subscription. Some of them can be free-to-air, and you get your advertising and sponsorship. And we're using social media channels to promote the channel. I've got a little promo here, which I'll play you. This is the loud one for our sound colleagues. This feature makes it incredibly easy to get a sharp picture these days. I'll just take a few shots. I'm glad to just calm the sky down a little bit.

Speaker 1: That's looking quite cool. I'm getting a really cool effect there. Quite good.

Speaker 4: Here, I've got this gorilla pod.

Speaker 2: The way I'm going to tackle this is slightly unusual for light-packing. You can get the sun coming through the arch. So, there you go. So, it's not... It's not difficult to see how these niches, these verticals, can appeal to subsets of the audience, and it's not difficult to see how they lend themselves to video. But you can also take a wide range of interest groups, not just consumer, not just tech, but also possibly people that are interested in self-help, people that are interested in particular kinds of news, people that are interested in particular kinds of sport, and so on. And I think the great advantage, and now has never been a better opportunity to do it, is creating, curating and producing video to service a well-established brand. It's never been easier, and it's never been cheaper. You need to know the audience, but you know your audiences already. You go for quality content, and you produce the right kind of content, and you support your staff with the right kind of training. It's not the 40, 50 million euro investment that you would need to do for a news channel. And it's scalable. So, if in doubt, call the experts, but this is not a sales pitch. So, that's digital video channels. And if you want to talk more to us, chat about what implications this has, we have a little stand over there, the news market. Come and join us, and we'll give you a sandwich. Thank you very much. Thank you.