Iplayer, Hulu, Vimeo and Youtube have made it manifestly evident that TV is facing a huge challenge from the web, not just for revenues and mindshare but also as an alternative channel to market. But it’s not just a quantitative ‘cheap and many’ channels issue; there’s likely to be a profound qualitative change in how we watch television that threatens the value of things that conventional TV people hold as given: things like scheduling, channel brands and the primacy of television commissioning.

I’ve noticed that when TV execs talk about ipTV they focus on the pipe and the device and assume that the content and the viewing experience will stay much the same (a mass media experience). I came away from The Guardian’s Changing Broadcast summit at the Mayfair Hotel last week with the strong impression that they believe that by pushing event-based TV and ‘combining the creative skills of UK TV production with the ubiquity of the UK digital market’ they can confront the multiple threats they face from digital. 

I think it would be interesting to mull over these questions first:

• How can the value of scheduling and channel brands remain intact when we make decisions about what to watch (whatever, whenever) by what our friends and other people we trust are watching?
• What happens when national barriers fall down (and I can watch Hulu in the UK and BBC iplayer in France)?
• How will a long tail of television (with geographic spread, not just historic) change what I watch and how I decide what to watch and the habits I fall into?
• What will be the impact of more access to shortform have on TV viewing behaviour (just check out five.tv/fwd). 
• When I can respond instantly to what I’m seeing, in lots of different ways to different people or just everybody watching with me, over an interface that’s easy to use, how might my viewing habits and - just as interestingly - TV formats change? (And has the failure of red button created a false sense of security?).

My guess is that across diverse viewing contexts and audience segments some very wide differences in behaviour, formats, channel branding and tv discovery will emerge.

It’s easy for the hangover of a lifetime of past perceptions to shroud us from future reality. It’s interesting that most of the people adopting the comforting approach that nothing will fundamentally change were over the age of 40.  At the end of the day there was a panel of thirtysomethings representing Endemol Digital, RDF Digital, Channel 4, BBC3 and Bebo with a completely different mindset because they started their careers at a time when the old models were already looking tired. Here are some refreshing snippets: 

“Everything done on television is done online simultaneously - commissioning is multiplatform” (BBC3)

“What success is like is really hard to get at” (BBC3)

“We are experimenting to try to find out which models work” (Bebo)

“The web allows us to challenge the old model where we got paid by the cost of what we made, rather than by its value” (RDF)

and most intelligently of all:

“We’re having to learn very fast to keep up with the audience” 

Dave Birss of Unchained Guide was a Creative Director at Poke London before leaving to take on more responsibilities at his own company. He has just re-posted a very interesting post on the future of digital agencies on his blog, originally written a year ago, that is very useful and still relevant - especially because we at Made By many work in the digital world. You can read his entire post here. 

In an orgy of nepotism and fraternal pride I managed to persuade my colleagues to knock up a blog to cover the progress of my youngest brother Jonny Malbon as he sails single-handed, non-stop and without assistance around the world in the ‘Everest of the Seas’ the ultimate ocean race, The Vendee Globe. The race starts at lunchtime on Sunday. Jonny will set out at the helm of the 60 foot Artemis - a brand new, super-powerful 60 foot racing yacht - along with 29 other sailors/boats (7 in total from the UK) to cover the 28,000 miles from Les Sables D’Olonne in Brittany.

Around half of the 90 day voyage is spent in the Southern Ocean as the boat loops round the bottom of the world passing South America and Southern Africa before heading back up to France to complete the circuit. The Southern Ocean is one of the most extreme, scary, hostile, lonely and freezing places on earth, with icebergs, storms and freak waves coming at you from all sides for about six weeks. You’d have to be utterly insane to do this, and judging from Jonny’s interview by Will Greenwood in today’s Daily Telegraph (in which he talks about the hallucinations he experienced during his solo training sails) he’s certainly qualified in that category.

Never one to pass up the opportunity to experiment with stuff, we’ve set Jonny up with a Twitter account and he’ll be Tweeting as he goes. Twitter is actually the perfect social tool for this: the satellite comms system onboard Artemis is vital for receiving weather reports and acts as an umbilical chord in the outer space he’ll be sailing through at bottom of the world. He won’t be surfing the Web much. He’ll also be quite busy dodging icebergs and dealing with ‘the voices’, so we’ve set him up with a Twitter Mail account. He’ll be able to fire off bursts of up to 140 characters that will appear in his Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/VendeeGlobe) as well as the sidebar of his blog (http://jonnymalbon.com).

Artemis has an official site at ArtemisOceanRacing.com but the blog will be written by friends and family - mainly my Dad who would in any case have been spending the next 90 days plotting the boats progress on Google Earth and scouring the Web for news. Now he’ll be piloting a blog with his mates. I hope it becomes a useful place to bring together coverage from all over, and Twitter should bring Jonny’s experience right onto our desktops in a raw and real way.

We’ll be running our own experiments as the race develops. Go and follow Jonny on Twitter and we’ll keep you updated.

In this week’s New Media Age this week (6 November issue), Steve Richards the MD of Yomega has written a letter titled ‘BA shows brands the way to use social media’. It’s a very nice letter in which Steve says:

“British Airways’ foray into social media underlines the appeal and potential of these channels for mainstream brands. UGC gets its fair share of damaging headlines, but BA’s Metrotwin initiative grasps the value of social media at a strategic level, underlining the BA brand as digitally astute and accessible and instilling a sense of community amongst its customers.”

Thanks Steve. We salute you right back. With competitors like you, who needs friends?

To celebrate the end of another packed, exciting week at MxM, we had tea and cake. Tim is an advocate of proper tea, made from leaves, in a pot; so I took this picture for him of a sketch I saw in Howies on Carnaby St.

A fellow typographer has created a great series of postcards that show the subliminal messages sent out when using different typefaces.

With tongue firmly in cheek, some of the postcards are absolutely spot on. Who can doubt that Comic Sans isn’t the hand of God or that the typeface Stencil isn’t Rambo 4?

However, I was intrigued by the choice of subliminal message for Gill Sans: I am the son of a stonecutter. This is surprising, not least because there are so many things you could hold up against Eric Gill that being a son of a stonecutter is a bit of a cop out, but mainly because to many Gill Sans cries out “I am English”.

The typeface has a long history of being used for organizations that have a national prominence or by companies that are uniquely identified as having British heritage. From the LNER to the Ministry of Information, from Jan Tschichold’s iconic designs for Penguin to the BBC.

It was this heritage that we experimented using when we started the design phase of Metrotwin, the social utility for Nylonistas. One of the first ideas we discussed was signposting the different cities through colour and type:

The choice of Gill Sans for London was clearly cut, as was the choice of Helvetica Medium for New York. Used (in a roundabout route) by Massimo Veignelli and Bob Noorda for their signage plan for the NYC subway system, it’s now a ubiquitous part of the city’s identity, found on virtually every street corner.

Our colour choice was also to be found on every corner: yellow for New York cabs and black for London taxis. (We also had a secondary palette which didn’t get developed which used red British telephone boxes and blue American post boxes.)

In the end, we decided that the 2 colours (especially when reinforced by images of taxis as on the Metrotwin home page) had such a strong meaning that having city specific fonts was over kill.

However, it’s undoubtedly true that both colours and fonts have the power to create associations and send out messages of their own accord. Which reminds me, with Obama surging ahead in the polls there’s a really obvious one that Lars left out: