Further speakers have been confirmed for ‘Getting the picture: opportunities in local TV’, a conference on Wednesday 24 April, at the Liverpool Screen School, for which Prolific North is the media partner.
The conference keynote speaker is Ed Hall, the chief executive of Comux UK.
Other confirmed speakers now confirmed include Neil Mortensen, research and planning director, Thinkbox; Matt Locke, director, Storythings; Kerry Traynor and Kevin Usher, director media enterprise segment marketing at Avid.
The conference is being held just a few weeks after the final licences were awarded for phase one and as the launch of phase two has just been announced.
Tickets for the conference are free but early registration is recommended as it is expected to be fully subscribed.
The conference’s keynote speaker, Ed Hall, is regarded as one of the UK’s leading television entrepreneurs, having worked on more than eighty television channel launches on all UK platforms and also in Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Australia. His vision for a community-owned transmission infrastructure for local television resulted in the creation of Comux UK, which won the licence to run the local television multiplex, in January this year.
Neil Mortensen of Thinkbox will be presenting the TV advertising element of the local TV proposition. A former director of research for ITV, he will be representing Thinkbox which is the marketing body for commercial TV in the UK, in all its forms. Its shareholders are Channel 4, ITV, Sky Media, Turner Media Innovations and UKTV who represent over 90 per cent of commercial TV advertising revenue through their owned and partner TV channels.
Matt Locke established Storythings in 2011 to experiment with new ways of telling stories. Before this, he as head of multi-platform commissioning at Channel 4, responsible for a £7m budget for multi-platform projects around some of Channel 4’s biggest brands, and developing a new commissioning strategy based on emerging audience behaviours. He will be exploring cross-platform content and delivery at the conference.
Kerry Traynor, a PhD student at the Institute of Cultural Capital, is researching the impact of local media. Her study is exploring the ways in which local media can contribute to increased civic participation and the creation of social and cultural capital, particularly within urban conurbations with low levels of democratic engagement.
Kevin Usher has been with Avid for over 18 years during which time he has managed the solutions development team and the product management and product marketing teams in EMEA. His experience in the broadcast, television and communications industries spans over 28 years with previous positions held at Sony Broadcast and Communications, Grass Valley Group, Independent Broadcasting Authority and Phillips Telecommunications. He is a director of the Media Enterprise segment marketing team with responsibility for Avid storage, server and News systems.
