In a year marked by the financial crisis, which for the audiovisual market has meant a drop in advertising revenue of over 20%, President of Mediapro Jaume Roures believes it is time to look for new formulas to regain lost ground. This was one of the conclusions he presented in the ESADE Matins session "DTT and Television’s Future Challenges".

Decrease in the advertising world’s participation in TV has meant that investment has dropped from 3.6 billion to 2.4 billion euros over the last year. Jaume Roures does not think the outlook is very encouraging. He believes that unless TV companies are able to change the situation "the drop will get worse, and we won’t be able to get back to the 2007 levels of investment until 5 or 6 years down the line".

So there is a new outlook for the audiovisual sector, with more fragmentation of channels, and fewer leaders in audience. Roures claimed that this would mean channels falling into line together, something which had never happened before, and private companies’ negotiations would become "very complicated".

As Roures saw it, this would lead to the autonomous TV channels spending more on structure than on content. This is te opposite of what RTVE has done, with a restructuring process which, he believed, should serve as an example for the other channels: "if the autonomous channels can’t follow the same process, they will find themselves cut off from reality".

Prospects of the Law on the Funding of RTVE

The private TV channels’ concern at the demand for investment for RTVE was treated with caution by the Mediapro President. He believed that the 20% that was destined for the public TV channel "will not solve the problem … because most of the advertising taken away from TVE will not go back into the sector".

As far as Roures was concerned, business models for TV, which have been somewhat shown up by the current situation, will have to adapt and join together with other structures of different size and importance, which will be a "necessary but complex" process.  He went on to explain that "unless private TV companies are able to make this leap, we will see the crisis getting worse".

DTT versus Traditional Television

The anticipated analogue switch-off pre-supposes readiness to deal with the future. Roures believed that "for TV companies, Digital Terrestrial Television is a drastic change", and added, "we will go from a relatively calm and traditional situation to one which presents a number of system sustainability problems". He claimed that there would be a "radical" change in the channels’ working model.

Similarly, the lack of a single platform means that the channels’ brands will weaken. Because of this, Roures pointed to the need to put more focus on programming. He explained that the new television presented a number of challenges: on the one hand, reducing the dominance of "trash" television, offering more viewer participation, and on the other, integrating advertising into the contents.

Internet will be first to benefit

The Internet will be one of the media to benefit most from the new situation, said Jaume Roures. It is a tool that "segments very well", and enables you to reach the user who "is of most interest", he explained.

Furthermore, the Mediapro President believed that traditional advertising would disappear, because the press and traditional media "will not be able to pick it up".