Want to set up an online TV channel?

Learn the ropes from Iain Dale, who’s re-writing the broadcaster’s rule-book

We talk to Iain Dale and ask him - is 18 Doughty Street the biggest online-only TV channel in the world?

A-list bloggers reading this story might imagine that Microsoft’s Channel9 with millions of visitors a month watching enormous amounts of video is easily the biggest exclusively-Internet TV station (that is, of course, if you are prepared to call Channel9 a TV station, or if you don’t call it a videoblog or a vlog instead).

Want to know more?

Check out the BBC News website coverage of Dale's new venture

Oh, and you'd better be quick, because according to Dale, the EU is already threatening to shut his channel (and any others like it) down!

Here's our Podcast of the interview with Iain Dale:

Download iain_dale_podcast1.mp3

But what if we told you that there’s an online-only station with far more video production resources, far more content and far more political power and potential audience size, and that it isn’t even based in the US?

Here are some basic facts about a new web TV powerhouse:

• 18 Doughty Street is an online political TV channel in the UK
• It’s fronted by Iain Dale, the most popular political blogger in the UK
• It’s got more resources behind it than any other Internet-only TV channel
• It has four hours of programming four times a week on weekday nights
• It’s a mixture of live conversation and pre-recorded programmes

Here are just some of the highlights of our conversation with Ian Dale (listen to the podcast to hear all the gory details):

What is 18 Doughty Street? An Internet phenomenon or a TV Channel?

When Dale talks about 18 Doughty Street and where it’s heading, his reference points aren’t Scoble and Channel9 but traditional broadcasting networks like the BBC, ITV and Sky-TV (for those in the US, read NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox and CNN, who all fit Dale’s model equally well).

In fact when we asked him about Channel 9, he’d never even heard of it – (we were so shocked to learn this that we forgot to ask him about RocketBoom, which is even more popular).

Because we were ‘thinking Internet’ and Dale was ‘thinking TV’ this conversation was a mutual discovery process - Dale was surprised by how surprised we were by the scale of his operation.

This is because he compares his own ‘resources to programming content creation ratio’ to that of the BBC, which might call upon the services of hundreds of people to produce just one single hour of programming (although some ‘ultra low budget’ BBC political shows might ‘only’ require a mere 20 to 30 professionals to put them together).

So maybe that’s why Dale hasn’t realised that he's running what is currently the biggest online-only TV entity in the world – when he thinks about 18 Doughty street, as far as the blogosphere is concerned, he’s not comparing apples with apples (although, to give him his due, as you’ll hear in the podcast, he has no qualms about claiming to be running the biggest online political TV channel, and we’re certain he’s bound to know much more about political TV than we do).

How is it funded?

Tory entrepreneur Stephan Shakespeare, the  guy behind ‘YouGov’ put up a six figure sum (maybe seven figures in dollars, we didn’t ask) to get the channel up and running and to keep it there for the first year.

Alongside Dale and Shakespeare is Tim Montgomery, the man behind ‘Conservative home’.

What are they up to?

Instead of the classic tough ‘newsroom’ style of questioning, putting the interviewee on the spot and grilling them until they squirm, Dale opts for a much more relaxed, chat-show style.

The medium really is the message here because something new does seem to emerge in these more conversational encounters.

There’s a particularly revealing (one and a quarter hours long) chat with Shami Chakrabarti from human rights defenders Liberty who, as Dale points out, usually only gets 2 or 3 minutes to present her case – and an even more surprising response from the decidedly Conservative audience who emailed the program afterwards to say how refreshing they found the program. (Here's a direct link to the interview on 18 Doughty Street's Vox politics show).

The guests get room to breathe and it doesn’t, despite the ‘Daytime TV’ format – dumb things down.

Quite the opposite in fact – the issues tend to get the time they deserve and the guests aren’t as defensive and tend to come across as real people rather than ciphers for an ideological position.

The business strategy – get ready for TV migration

The word from Dale himself was more business-focused – he was looking to get the channel up and running before UK telecoms giants BT and NTL start migrating Internet-only TV channels to 'set-top boxes' (can someone update us on any such plans or speculations?) so although 18 Doughty Street may not be resourced-up like Fox TV, these guys have their sights set on the set-top in the living room, not just the laptop in the study.

But before going mainstream, they are looking to corral ‘influentials’ as a core audience – this seems to be working because, he tells us, at the recent Tory party conference – despite comparatively small initial viewing figures, everyone he spoke to among this select but sizeable gathering of centre-right political power-brokers already knew about the channel and had already tuned in.

Future business models

With such a bespoke audience profile, 18 Doughty Street may have what he believes is an advertiser’s dream and he will be looking at a range of funding models from advertising to product placement and sponsorship.

So it’s a weird hybrid - how did he resource it?

He thought at the outset that they’d need to get traditional broadcast production staff on-board – seeing as he and his fellow founders had only ever had experience in front of the camera rather than behind it.

But they soon found that they were having problems getting these broadcasting professionals to ‘get with the program’ because these stick-in-the mud types didn’t like the fact that Dale and Co. were breaking so many broadcast TV ‘rules’.

But Dale and his team went ahead and broke the rules anyway

What you need, Dale now believes, is a ‘can-do’ attitude. No-one has done this ‘online political TV thing’ before, so you don’t need to feel that you should be doing things the way that ‘The TV Professionals’ do it.

That goes for formats too

The shows have a 'daytime TV' look and feel which - as you might imagine - gives the initial impression that the whole thing might be somewhat superficial, but Dale’s lifelong immersion in the political news ferment ensures that discussions held in the quite cosy-looking living room setting actually probe deeply into the issues as the participants have the time to develop arguments and allow conversations to find their own way.

In fact, the whole thing started off with more structured programming but they soon found that people preferred the live (yes, that’s right, live, unlike Channel9 which is all recorded video) less structured conversational programming.

Although Dale doesn’t know Scoble, he’s undoubtedly speaking the same language, and for all we know, if they ever met, they would probably both find that they had a great deal to learn from one another.

Those are the broadcast issues – what about the website?

Dale is none too happy with the usability of the website – for one thing, he thinks not enough people are downloading shows after those shows have ‘gone out live’ because they can't work out how to find them on the website. 

How are they using interactivity?

Dale is currently using audience feedback to drive the programming schedule and though this is at an early stage, he’s aiming to put together an audience panel which will – one day soon, he hopes – choose the guests and also choose the programming content on the day that it goes out live.

This is pretty radical stuff: remember this is political TV, so ‘audience democracy’ in any new shape or form is undoubtedly going to attract attention from the 'old guard', although it remains to be seen as to whether it actually adds to the long term attractiveness or influence-impact of the site.   

What are the resources?

This is an operation on an altogether bigger scale than the ‘one geek, a bedroom and a camcorder’ model that characterises typical YouTube contributors and most of the Vlogosphere.

Dale has 12 dedicated staff and a six figure start-up budget working full time to produce four hours of live political programming four times a week.

In the podcast Dale also offers his views on:

• How broadcasters have dumbed down political programming
• How the 18DoughtyStreet audience (and his relationship with it) has developed since launch
• More about their experiments with programming formats
• What they’ve learned
• Where they’re headed next with their programming
• The team’s steep learning curve and the mindset you need to make this work
• Some audience statistics
• How they’ve used Youtube
• Their plans for the website and their current wishlist.