NEXTWAVE Digital-First Production summit

[1st Nov 2025] This weekend saw NEXTWAVE breaking on the banks of the Saale at Halle, Germany 🇩🇪 a 1-day Digital-First Production summit to bring discussion & exploration of Digital First Content & Social Video to the heart of mainland Europe. It was organised by Documentary Campus , reflecting our championing of Digital within the mix of Documentary and our progressive approach to staying fully aligned with the realities of today’s market. The summit was expertly curated by Justin Crosby of TellyCast – the content industry podcast . The European broadcasters from Helsinki to Rome were deeply engaged with what was covered, ranging from The New Documentary Landscape (which I chaired, spotlighting Zandland, Quintus & Channel 4’s Untold online strand) to How To Launch & Build a Successful Factual Channel on YouTube by Rob Wilson of vidIQ . More to follow in 2026…

Special thanks to my old colleague at C4 Janine Thomas , Gerrit Kemming & Josh Reynolds for a sparky conversation about the future of docs; Justin Crosby for a brilliant programme & selection of speakers; Nils Franck for being a dynamic digital champion on Documentary Campus Masterschool this year; my colleague Ingrid Hübscher for excellent organisation of this landmark day; and Donata Von Perfall and Dr. Patrick Hörl for being so squarely behind the event and the direction of travel.

Documentary Campus Masterschool pitching day

[1st Nov 2025] This weekend’s Documentary Campus Masterschool pitching day was a perfect illustration of the dynamism and uplifting energy of independent hashtag#documentary hashtag#filmmaking. It would have been great to bottle that pure vibe and send out crates of it far & wide to refresh anyone who is flagging or struggling right now.

Among the nascent films – from as far afield as Ukraine and Ireland, Italy and Norway, Cambodia and the USA – it was a particular pleasure to now have digital-first projects in the mix and also to have alternative funders (like Crowdfunder ) amidst the decision-makers and broadcasters who generously made the effort to travel to the beautiful city of Halle and join in with enthusiasm.

We are working very hard at Doc Campus to be fleet of foot and fully aligned with the realities of the market as it is now. That’s why we followed up the pitching with Next Wave, a full day of exploring the digital dimension of Documentaries and the new possibilities emerging… 

New Television – the age of YouTube

Today (23.iv.25) is the 20th anniversary of YouTube. On 23rd April 2005 a 19-second video called ‘Me At the Zoo’ was published on YouTube showing one of its co-founders, Jawed Karim, filmed by his high school buddy, Yakov Lapitsky.

Twenty years on we all know those upload statistics – in the 19 seconds of ‘Me At the Zoo’ 114 hours of video will have been uploaded as things stand today. That’s some 2.6 million videos a day. YouTube now hosts 5.1 billion videos.

From the point of view of the TV industry, more significant stats are that while Netflix will have more than 340 million paying subscribers this year and over 600 million users, YouTube reaches well over 2 billion users across the globe. Also, in February YouTube CEO Neal Mohan announced that for the first time TV screens had overtaken mobile as the “primary device for YouTube viewing in the US” (by watch time). Mohan confirmed that one of YouTube’s four big bets for 2025 is to be “the new television”. It is indeed already the world’s first truly global TV network.

One of the things that’s instructive about the advent of YouTube is that it was born out of failure. The original concept was an online dating service (tagline: “Tune In, Hook Up”) with a video-sharing component. The founders – Karim, Chad Hurley & Steve Chen – abandoned the original dating concept but realised they had an exceptional video uploading platform on their hands.

This is a not uncommon pattern. YouTube specialists Little Dot Studios – where I was the first Commissioning Editor of Originals – started life with a focus on protecting IP on YouTube on behalf of rightsholders. Through that operation the founders realised that full-length documentaries and other particular programming was being pirated so they built a business model to offer that content legitimately on YouTube. They now publish some 6 billion views of video a month(!) and will have 125 YouTube channels in their owned & operated network by the end of this year.

Shortly before YouTube appeared, while I was a pioneering multiplatform Commissioning Editor at Channel4, C4’s documentary department launched 4Docs, a platform for sharing short documentaries. I made one of the earliest ones, ‘Spark‘, to help get the momentum going – it was about an odd couple (a traumatised Portuguese conscript and a former Black Shirt) on the allotments beside my house. That was a classic example of unfortunate timing with the US behemoth starting to cast its shadow.

I  had the pleasure of introducing this new thing called YouTube to the BAFTA TV committee when I was a co-opted member and early advocate of multiplatform. I proposed a new category called ‘New Television’ – they made me go off and write an essay about what I meant. I gave the nascent YouTube as an example and described it thus: “The video equivalent of Flickr (what Flickr is to photos YouTube is to video) – an application for sharing video of all kinds”. Hilarious of course given that these days few know what Flickr is.

Digital platforms come and digital platforms go. YouTube now enters its third decade well on the way to becoming the biggest and most important beast in the jungle. Doc Hearts, like many other TV indies, are working fast & furiously on our YouTube strategy in a bid to take back control from the vagaries of commissioned TV. Likewise at Doc Campus we are presenting Digital-First Content on equal terms with feature docs and factual TV. As the edifices of the TV business crumble, spaces open up between the ruins… YouTube is a key part of those opening spaces.