In conversation with DPP founder Mark Harrison

 Images by Lars Huebner

FEED: How does the DPP differ from other media organisations?

MARK HARRISON: The DPP is an international network for media and technology, and what that means in practice is that we bring companies from across the whole content supply chain. From broadcasters and content platforms, all the way through to their technology suppliers and into the production community; we bring them together in order to provide them with the insight and connections needed to do their business better. 

What I think is distinctive about the DPP is that we are not a trade body, meaning that we are not an organisation that is here to defend the interests of any particular group. Our strength is in the fact that we’re a neutral entity, and we are here to help all parts of the media supply chain understand where the industry is going and what the opportunities are within that. The DPP has to go with the change, whatever the change might happen to be, and if it happens to be bad for a particular part of the industry, so be it. We have to look at what that means for everybody else. And I think that gives us an energy and a vitality – and keeps us very contemporary and relevant.

It’s about identifying challenges, understanding how we can overcome them, or even where can we see opportunity in them. Although we do gather some of our knowledge and expertise from the external world, a lot of it comes from talking to the experts within our membership base. That’s one of the reasons our insight reports are so highly regarded – they are the product of conversations with both the customer community and the vendor community. We get both sides of the equation when we look at the role of technology in how the industry is changing.

Taking it back for a moment, tell us about your background and how that has ultimately helped to shape the DPP?

I spent 25 years in production, as a director, producer and then later on as an executive producer – running content companies or content departments. The creative end of the industry is absolutely where I come from – production is my passion.

In some ways, it’s quite odd that I’ve ended up being a founder of – and a key part of – an organisation that’s much more focused on the technology and operations part of the industry. But how that has actually helped us and made the DPP distinct is that I have never seen technology as an end in itself. 

Technology on its own does not fundamentally interest me. What interests me is what technology can do. Process doesn’t interest me. Producers are famously resistant to any kind of set processes or set ways of doing things. So, similarly, they don’t interest me fundamentally and inherently. But when I can see how established processes or best practice processes can bring great outcomes for content and for audiences, I’m really excited by them. 

That approach helps ensure the DPP is always focused on what we’re all actually here to do, which is to get the product (which is content) to the audience, and we don’t get lost in an infatuation with the process and the technology themselves.

I think the other way in which my background helps shape the way we are is that, as a producer, you learn how to communicate complicated ideas in an authoritative way because it’s got to be accurate and correct to a broad audience. 

Communication is what production is all about. I like to think that the DPP has always been known for being authoritative, but having a very accessible level of communication. People always say that our reports are extremely readable, even though the subject matter might be quite dense. And they tell us that they find our events well produced, enjoyable and well run. Those are things that come from my production background and have become instilled in the DPP culture.

How do you feel the media and entertainment industries have evolved since you were making films 20 years ago?

The single most important change is the move from a supply-based economy to a demand-based economy. When I first started making programmes, it was all about broadcasters deciding what they wanted to make, making it in their own good time when they were ready, then serving it at an appointed moment to the audience. The content was completely supply-led. And even if trends emerged in the way consumers were consuming, the turnaround time of responding to some of those trends was really long – months and years.

Meanwhile, in the technology space, broadcasters were very focused on quality, and they set the standards for how things were consumed. For example – the move from black & white to colour, or the move to digital, the move to high definition. All those things happened when the broadcasters decided they should happen – and in a way that they dictated it. 

That approach has now completely shifted, both in terms of the content and the technology experience – consumers now set the agenda. The effect of that in the content space has been to create a much more direct connection between content and audience. From that, we have seen the emergence of content creators who have grown up developing their craft in that space. Something that is a very different approach to content making, where they are constantly trying different methods to see what works. Then the technology space had really changed when it comes to what we think technology is for. Yes, quality is still important, although we have a much more adaptable view of quality. But things like speed, agility, usability and cost – all those things are now a much bigger part of the conversation.

Even stepping back from changes like the rise of Netflix and YouTube and so forth – all those things are just an outcome from this historic move from supply to demand.

Was that catalysed by the pandemic?

The impact that the pandemic had is not the one that we thought at the time it was having. At the time, we saw this huge increase in the consumption of content because everybody was at home – and particularly streamed content. 

But that ultimately provided a very distracting and damaging message to the industry because we were already in a kind of content arms race; the volume of original content being commissioned in the US had increased tenfold in the space of 20 years. So that was before the pandemic. We were already producing enormous amounts of content, and then we got this message that consumers love streaming and they love content, so we produce even more – and then the bubble burst. It was never sustainable because it had been a loss leader. The whole basis on which the streaming revolution happened had been on trying to build subscribers, build share as fast as possible. It was never a viable economic model for multiple providers at scale.

Now, when we look back at the pandemic, the way we should see it is that it was the last hurrah before the wake-up call of 2022 when the bubble burst and production volumes fell dramatically, and have remained dramatically down to this day.

Can you tell us why media organisations are needed in 2025?

There was once a time when media organisations had a really effective role in enabling cross-industry collaboration, particularly around technology and standards over time. And that worked very well in a supply-led world because you could work to get everybody aligned before you chose to make a major change. Now that the consumers set the agenda and change is so rapid, it’s incredibly difficult to make those collaborations effective. It’s not impossible, and does happen from time to time, but it’s much more challenging. Ironically, though, I think the speed of change in some respects increases the need for media organisations. That’s because media companies cannot possibly keep up with that pace and complexity of change, so they need some trusted guides who are neutral to help navigate. As long as a media organisation does stay current and committed to that kind of ambition, then I actually think an organisation like the DPP has got a really strong purpose.

What kinds of companies are joining the DPP at the present moment?

When the DPP first began, it came out of the definition of a common file-delivery specification. We began in a very technical place – so most of the early members were actually established media companies, particularly vendors, who had some role in the preparation and delivery of content. Anybody moving content, or who worked with it, was interested in the DPP. 

That has really shifted as we’ve become an organisation which is now much more focused upon strategic change – the profile of our membership has broadened. Yes, we still have lots of the well-known and established players. But I think what’s quite striking has been companies coming into the media space out of the broader IT sector, who want to build contacts and understanding in media and entertainment. We’re seen as a way of helping them do that. 

What’s also been interesting has been the content organisations themselves. When we first began, we reached out to broadcasters on the continent of Europe, for instance, and said, “Would you be interested in joining the DPP?” They almost all said no, and were completely focused on their own needs within their own national boundaries. But then, three or four years ago, that changed dramatically, and now one of our strongest growth areas for membership is the European broadcaster community. That’s because those companies now know that the fact most of them operate within national boundaries means they don’t compete with each other. They can benefit hugely from learning from their counterparts in other countries. 

They also can no longer afford to have departments full of people who go out and look at media strategy – they instead need to outsource some of that expertise. And that’s where we come in. 

Doesn΄t the speed of change, and the intensely competitive market, make it impossible to think of communities of interest and strategic insight?

Operating against the existence of something like an industry organisation – the industry is now moving so fast and is so highly competitive – you may think that the sense of community would have diminished.

But actually, again, I think the opposite has taken place. What’s happened is it’s meant that people now need openness. They need sharing because they cannot pretend to themselves that they can either operate across the whole supply chain, or have knowledge across the whole supply chain. 

When the DPP started ten years ago, one of our biggest barriers was that a lot of vendors would say to me quite openly: “We love complexity. We love things going wrong because we make money from it.” The fact that production companies and broadcasters didn’t understand the tech as well as they did was brilliant in their eyes. They didn’t want that to change because they profited from it. Equally, we’d find major broadcasters who would say they didn’t want to share anything because they thought their means of production was a competitive advantage. That has now completely inverted. 

Any vendor that wants to make a living out of complexity is going to go bust pretty fast. Nowadays, customers simply will not accept it. And, meanwhile, any customer organisation that wants to try and compete on the basis of having some highly bespoke, individualised and special means of doing things is going to be in trouble because you can’t afford to do that any more. Now people are much more focused on how partnerships, interoperable ecosystems and so on can actually end up benefitting everybody.

Is there anything we can do as an industry to make the future feel predictable and controllable?

As an industry, we historically have been absolutely terrible at prediction. 

We tend to get infatuated with whatever new thing has emerged. From 3D through the first Google Glasses, through AI interactivity and, of course, VR and then AI, we always like to say ‘insert name of technology’ will change everything. We don’t use our experience and expertise to ask the much more interesting and challenging question of precisely how this technology will impact the industry. 

It’s extremely rare that a technology does change everything, and when it has, it has always been in the consumer realm – and we’ve always failed to spot it. 

Nobody saw what smartphones were going to do. Nobody saw what consumer texting would lead to, and then what social video would lead to. The biggest changes have actually been missed by us. 

I therefore think what is really important for us to do now is to acknowledge that we’ve had 20 years of dramatic and rapid change. That’s how long we’ve been saying “wow, who would have thought it?” or “can you believe it?”. All those phrases have been going for 20-odd years. We do have quite a lot to look back on that could provide us with clues, particularly around human behaviours and the way that technologies get adopted. 

Secondly, we really should know by now that the biggest changes to impact media and entertainment won’t come from within. They’ll come from without; from what consumers are doing, either with hardware or, more probably, the software that sits on that hardware – and that’s where we need to be a bit more imaginative. For instance, consumers are already beginning to use generative AI as an everyday tool. How will that impact society, and then what part of that societal impact will go on to affect media and entertainment?

Are there any trends you feel confident will play out?

A big emphasis from the DPP from here on is for us to be more specific and more bold about what precisely we believe is going to happen. It’s very easy to raise these things as questions or ‘we think this could happen and this might happen’. Are there some things we are absolutely rock-solid certain are going to happen or have happened and will never go back? 

There are easy ones, like the meaning of what content is being redefined and not going back. Content will now exist in a huge range of forms, formats, durations, with a huge diversity of supply and a massive range of platforms. That’s just a reality. So it’s very important not to focus our thinking about digital transformation, for instance, around an outmoded idea of the supply of long-form content from historic media organisations. Yes, that’ll remain important for a while, but it’s only going to be a part of the content landscape. It shouldn’t be the defining part of tech supply.

The supplier base for technology is going to diversify. There’s pro AV, but also because we’ve got a very diversified and distributed form of content creation, we’re going to get this diversification of vendors to fit that market. 

There are going to be a lot of blurred boundaries between what we think historically as professional media technology and what we might have thought of as being consumer or prosumer technology – and exactly where those boundaries sit is going to be difficult to define, but we know it has to happen. This is the painful truth for media organisations. 

Consumers want aggregation. If consumers could have one subscription to access everything you could possibly want to watch on one device, a single monthly fee – if you offer that to consumers tomorrow – everyone would take it. All we’re going through right now is a period of resistance. We don’t know quite how long it’s going to last. We don’t know what it’s going to take for it to get broken. In the meantime, we’re talking a lot about re-bundling. 

We’re talking a lot about aggregators of different kinds, whether they’re aggregating apps or whether they are true aggregators like YouTube. But either way, that’s a historical force in play and everything should, in my view, be measured against that reality.  Related to that is the advertising market, which is also getting highly distributed, and the way that operates in an internet-led world is going to define what happens to many of the established media organisations. The historic linear advertising model is not yet completely broken and gone, but it’s going to crumble – and so will our ability to follow the ad dollars and where they are going. That is going to be the kind of signal that I think shows us where change is going to happen, and why. 

How does all of this apply to the DPP itself? And how will it keep itself fit for the future?

We can’t sit still for a moment. I think you know that in any organisation, particularly once it has achieved a certain age and achieved a certain scale, it becomes quite natural for everybody involved to become very attached to what you’ve become, to the way you do things. 

It takes a lot of willpower and determination to keep on questioning yourself every single day and asking, are we still relevant? Are we still delivering the things that media organisations need – because, if we’re not, then why ever should they be DPP members? 

The key thing to know about the DPP is that it will not look the same in one year’s, two years’, three years’ time as it did a year or two before. And if that’s the case, then we must be doing something right.

Read our previous interview with Andy Waters to find out how UK broadcast has diversified.

This feature was first published in the Autumn 2025 issue of FEED.