Time, Technology, and Transformation in Television Production
SCRMCI recently hosted a stimulating talk by Dr Anna Zoellner, Associate Professor at the School of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds. During her session, Dr Zoellner discussed how time, technology, and industry shifts are transforming television production, particularly in the British context.
Overarching the session was the nature of using time as an economic commodity in factual TV. Dr Zoellner said that time has always been measured in fiscal terms in British television — where public service broadcasters maintain a critical role — despite deregulations, industry reconfigurations, and market laws transforming its face. This process increases existing pressures — deadlines are compressed, budgets are reduced, and the workers’ challenges are increased. Since one creates factual content, the struggle between creative integrity and financial constraints becomes elusive.
The discussion focused extensively on another change — the employment structure. Permanent positions have been replaced to a great degree by flexible and short-term contracts. For self-shooting producer-directors, this translates into multi-hats — directing, filming, producing — whilst competing with the problem of diminishing budgets and increasing managerial control. While this model is flexible, it also leads to precarity, a longer working day, and a lack of creative autonomy. Dr Zoellner also highlighted the lack of diversity within the industry acting as a limitation.
Dr Zoellner reiterated the problem of unpaid work in television production. While unpaid contributions are usually pitched as an opportunity, this raises several ethical questions, particularly if programs rely on the time and authenticity of those offering contributions. As production shifts from the linear to the multi-linear model, workloads rise, and numerous individuals assume many roles without keeping pace with the appropriate recognition and reward remuneration that is also due. This “occupational conversion” complicates career progressions and disrupts the economy of creative labour’s worth for money.
During the session, she also discussed how creating television content has become increasingly fragmented. Independent departments, often without interaction with other parts of the delivery organisation, tend to become isolated, suffering from a lack of shared information, miscommunication, imprecise allocation of resources and diminished opportunities for training. Inefficiencies in poor quality footage, increased health and safety risk, and workplace dissatisfaction are other consequences. Sometimes, employees feel they are complicit in maintaining this system by furthering their winning of a living through self-exploitation, working themselves to excess to lag, Zoellner acknowledged.
There was much discussion of the role of artificial intelligence (AI) and concerns about its role in the creative industries. While it has yet to impact documentary production significantly, AI has already transformed things like design and photography. It offers potential for visualisation and efficiency with an accompanying drift to unsettling traditional concepts of creativity and authorship. Beyond AI, structural problems of gender, class, and ethnicity still play roles in careers in the media, as well as balancing stressful work schedules and personal lives.
Finally, Dr Zoellner covered the implications of platformization — the fact that digital platforms are taking over media. While the impact of globalisation on the production of drama in Britain is the most demonstrable, it has less of an effect on the production of factual programming. Dr Zoellner stressed the need to consider temporal experiences of cultural imagination in transnational media organisations and made way for crossing borders in comparative research.
The one message that Dr Zoellner’s talk communicated was that time is the thread out of sight that guides public media activities. From precarity of employment to unpaid work to AI to platformization, how time is valued and experienced significantly affects workers and audiences/content. To create a sustainable and diverse television industry, the challenge is to rethink how we value creativity, collaboration and the human work at its core.
