Hamburg.
The next session here at next09 is a panel on the future of public broadcasting organisations with Ian Forrester from the BBC and Robert Amlung from the ZDF, under the theme of open media. Both are clearly aware of the increasing involvement of users in media content creation and distribution, and aim to tap more into this; the ZDF is aiming especially to make redistribution legal by employing appropriate content licencings schemes (e.g. Creative Commons) and offering a suite of RSS feeds for its content. It is becoming more and more important to make content available to users (who, as licence or as tax payers, have already paid for it).
At the same time, of course, public media organisations also need to make sure that their brand is protected; that the content made available under their name conforms to the standards expected of them (and required by the public charters under which they operate). It is not in the interest of these organisations that anything goes.
Ian adds that 'broadcasting is dead', at least in its traditional, literal form. Public broadcasting organisations now operate in a more complex media space where multiple connections between media makers and audiences are created, and some of the content created and exchanged in the process may be branded or endorsed by the BBC with various degrees of emphasis.
Part of this is also learning that the new digital world is much more complex than the past with its very limited number of television channels (the ZDF was a one-channel broadcaster for the majority of its existence, for example, but this is now no longer true). This requires a major reorganisation of the organisation and its processes.
