Practical Bravery: LEE RADBOURNE

HYPERFAST HUMANITY!

Lives in the 21st century are now so integrated with the infrastructure of streaming technology that we’ve forgotten to question it. The variety, volume and speed of everything – from media to research, entertainment to sport, stock markets to multi-stakeholder conferences in 7 different simultaneous time zones – is constantly pushing the envelope of more, bigger and faster.

So who is in charge of this? Consumers? Producers? Regulators?

The special guest to explore this, is one of the UK’s leading experts of streaming technology: Lee Radbourne – General Manager (EMEA), Aura

Key quotes:

“There’s an element of loss of waiting, or anticipation. The Mandalorian for example, on Disney Plus, is released on a schedule now, almost like a linear show. Madness! What do you mean I can’t just binge it over a weekend, like I normally do? The instant gratification comes more from an expectation.”

“Our kids have no concept of what a device is, or what a video recorder is, or even within technology, what a server is. My favourite an anecdote I keep seeing is, you ever seen kids trying to describe what the ‘save’ button is? Trying to explain it was a physical three-and-a-half-inch floppy disc!”

“I think it’s sensible to take a pause sometimes with technology. But I think it’s just one simple thing that’s going to change the way we deliver stuff and make stuff more personalised. We already have good policy in place. GDPR is good policy, it does protect people.”

“The younger generation, they know the value of their data. So if there’s an incentive for them and it’s in their interest, they’re quite happy to share data. The reason your daughter doesn’t care is all her friends are on Tik Tok.”

“Whether we like it or not, commercialism and capitalism is the market of choice at the moment and that’s how we make our money and there is value in the data.”

“There’s a lot of dinosaurs out there who are set in their ways, and their goal is to make as much money as possible and they don’t care how they do it. There’s also people coming through who are now bursting into senior roles or executive roles, like myself, we grew up before the Internet, without smartphones, and we know what is important to us. That’s just what good business looks like now, you have to be conscious of your social impact. How are we going to give back?”

“I’d love to get to the point where we can make a carbon neutral streaming platform.”

“Unfortunately with all these things, these things take time!”

“sub one-second latency”

“This is game-changing for the industry and I think it’ll really make a difference to the way we consume content.”

Useful links

This episode was recorded in April 2023

Interviewer: Richard Freeman for always possible

Editor: CJ Thorpe-Tracey for Lo Fi Arts

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