Media value should determine cost of access

17 November 2009

BU Visiting Professor argues that artificial barriers should not stop consumers from accessing media content in the digital age.

Whether consumers should pay for media content in the digital age could be determined by the real or unique value of that content.

That’s one of the many suggestions explored by Anthony Lilley during his Professorial Inaugural Lecture at BU. Lilley, one of the UK’s leading experts in interactive media, was recently appointed as Visiting Professor to the University’s Centre for Excellence in Media Practice.

His lecture, Paying Attention: the changing value of media in the Internet age attracted a full house as BU launched its Professorial Inaugural Lecture series for the 2009-10 season.

With the digital age taking media from a period of ‘scarcity’ of information to an age of abundance, Lilley advocates the notion that artificial barriers should not be put up to stop consumers from getting hold of that information.

“The idea that content should be readily accessible and easily available is not the same as the idea that it should never be charged for or that it should never have any value attached to it,” said Lilley, Chief Executive and Chief Creative Officer of the award-winning interactive media company Magic Lantern Productions.

“People are not going to die in a ditch to pay for The Sun if they can get the same content somewhere else. That doesn’t mean that it has to be free but it also doesn’t mean that it has to generate no value.”

For consumers, Lilley said, paying attention to the vast array of media content in the digital age requires a series of choices. Large organisations, he recalled, once created mass media content and information for large audiences. Now, as a creator of media himself, Lilley said that his thinking has shifted away from the masses and onto the ‘focus group of one’.

“The internet isn’t made up of audiences that turn up at 7.30 every Tuesday regardless,” he said. “It doesn’t respect time; it doesn’t respect geography; so every user, everyone arriving, reacts individually to my work.

“Most web pages I make – hundreds of millions in my career now – are seen by almost nobody for almost no time at all. That’s quite a levelling notion for the creator,” he said.

“Most people turn up to most websites and what they’re looking for is the next thing to do to allow them to leave. That’s very different to a notion of keeping people embedded within a linear story – very different to my original world in the theatre, for example, where the actor departing is quite a big statement. The actor departing the website is a default thing to what we do.”

“If content was all there was to media – just getting the idea from my brain to yours – that would be dead easy,” he concluded. “For example, why would we bother with theatre? I could just tell you the story.

“We bother with theatre because it is a shared experience with other people in the room. We bother with theatre because you as individual members of the audience can make your decisions about what you want to focus on, what you want to pay attention to, you don’t just go to the theatre to find out the ending.”

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