BroadcastingFreelancers can look beyond traditional TV

8th March 2010

Broadcasting

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Freelancers can look beyond traditional TV

Skilled staff should transfer their know-how between sectors, writes Moray Coulter.

Everyone in TV production is under pressure to find and keep sustainable income - from channel heads to newcomers.

But the dangers and opportunities that broadcasters and indies face are not directly applicable to freelance production staff, who make up a large part of their workforce. If the UK broadcast TV industry finds itself in crisis now, freelancers have a different set of worries.

The production freelancer exists in a sector where there are more skilled workers available than there is work for them all to do, and where experience only gets
you so far. On the contrary, the fear among production freelancers is that the more experience you have, the more likely you are to price yourself out of available work.

How many companies treat their freelancers as an expendable resource? There’s the ‘Logan’s Run Effect’, named after the movie in which everyone can expect to be
exterminated when they reach their 30th birthday regardless of what they have to offer. Few sustainable industries offer a more rickety career ladder than television
production.

Meanwhile, the TV companies’ own worries centre on production funding deficits, shrinking advertising value, increasing competition at home and abroad, and the
need for ever more imaginative ways of exploiting intellectual property - and all this in the face of a fragmenting audience. But that viewer fragmentation could be the saviour of the freelance production sector, because freelancers can make content for all those viewers, wherever they go.

It’s a given that people in this country are watching more TV and film than ever before, but that they are doing it at their own convenience, and through a range of platforms. A variety of screen and interactive media are ever more important to the way we all live and work, and television programme-makers have the transferable
skills to make that content.

Indies and broadcasters have a significant business model and cultural shift to make when working in corporate, commercial or multiplatform production. But
production freelancers need to make a smaller psychological step, focusing on the pre-agreed brief in corporate and commercial work or creating a two-way relationship with the users of interactive media.

It’s not all good news for the freelancers, of course. Pay is still relatively low, and half of them have never had a permanent job. Freelancers working for the TV indies earn on average £34,600 a year (according to Skillset). That figure is a bit higher in corporate production, and a bit lower in interactive media. But there’s a lot of work out there beyond traditional television.

The corporate TV production sector has an annual turnover in the UK of about £2.7bn, with healthy production budgets. Within the interactive sector, there are 7,500 web and internet companies, 500 offline media companies and 40 mobile-content companies, employing about 24,000 people between them.

None of the screen production sectors are closed shops, and it should become normal for skilled programme-makers to move between them, including broadcast
TV, without burning bridges.

Moray Coulter
Director of Broadcast Freelancer