The MIPTV conference in Cannes is where the television industry gathers to buy and sell shows, while debating the changing attitudes of broadcasters and producers, the shifting habits of viewers and the disruption coming from new technologies. This year's show was a mixture of stars – traditional celebrities, but also fresh-faced YouTubers with audiences in the millions – and strong opinions about how we're watching TV now, and how this may change in the years ahead.
1 Twitter wants to be the 'social soundtrack' for TV social networks
Twitter and Facebook are competing to become the online watercooler where people discuss their favourite shows. Twitter's pitch – as made by chief media scientist Deb Roy – is that it is a "synchronised social soundtrack for whatever is happening in the moment, as a shared experience".
During this year's Oscars, 5 million people sent 19m tweets that were seen by 37 million people – including Ellen DeGeneres's famous selfie. Meanwhile, a single episode of The X Factor in the UK last year tempted 1.2 million Brits to tweet. Roy also suggested that Twitter buzz could fuel new kinds of shows. "The opportunity is in the hands of storytellers in how to tap into this new creative storytelling … to look to the data, and to really go and pioneer potentially whole new genres."
2 YouTube and rivals are creating new stars and starry shows
Could the next Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones come from YouTube? It's not a ridiculous thought: there are growing numbers of sharp, witty and well-scripted dramas being made for online viewing – and not just on YouTube, with Hulu, Amazon, Xbox and (most famously) Netflix all commissioning. Britain also has a growing cadre of young YouTube stars reaching mass audiences. Twins Finn and Jack Harries are good examples: their JacksGap YouTube channel has 3.4 million subscribers, with their latest show documenting a rickshaw ride across India.
Gamer Joseph Garrett has 2.3 million subscribers – many of them kids – for his Stampylonghead channel, with its daily videos of a virtual cat exploring the Minecraft game. He's now spinning off a new education channel.
3 Jerry Springer was inevitable, just like social media
Jerry Springer delivered a robust defence of his chatshow genre's effects on society. "This concept that television has influenced human behaviour and the destruction of society is garbage. We had a Holocaust before anyone had a television set," he said.
Springer sought to put his show into historical context. "What is happening in the social media was inevitable. The coming of my show 23 years ago was inevitable. What we are witnessing is the democratisation of culture," he said.
"For thousands of years it was people sitting in an audience watching something happen on a stage, on a screen, on a ball-field. It was the audience and then the performers. Now, literally, the audience are the ones that are entertaining." And not just when throwing chairs.
4 Amazon is turning viewers into commissioners
Amazon's Studios division funds pilots and full series of TV shows for adults and children, then makes them available through its Prime subscription service – with brooding crime drama Bosch the latest show to be unveiled.
It's Amazon's commissioning process that's most interesting: it funds a pilot, puts it online and then waits to see how its customers rate and review the episode before deciding whether to commission a full series. "It is oddly Marxist in its idea, but it's a very smart business model," said Bosch star Titus Welliver. "What you're doing is empowering the people."
Amazon's Roy Price said show producers get over their "initial trepidation" rapidly. "At the end of the day we're in a commercial art form, we're not exchanging private haikus," he said. "You want to get your work out there in front of millions of viewers and see what they think."
5 Kids are causing the biggest changes in TV
The average six- to 14-year-old in the UK still spends 10.4 hours a week watching linear TV, according to research firm Dubit. But the growth of tablets is startling: the percentage of children with access to a tablet at home has surged from 20% in 2012 to 51% in 2013 and 84% now.
Angry Birds maker Rovio is one of the companies capitalising on this: it has quietly built its own kids' TV network within its mobile games, generating billions of views for shows by other companies – including Fraggle Rock – as well as its own cartoons. Meanwhile, British startup Hopster has an app blending shows with educational games. "For the first time this new, alternative 'first screen' is going to establish a relationship of equals with the TV," said Hopster founder Nicholas Walters.
6 Kim Cattrall is flying the flag for older women
Sex and the City star Kim Cattrall's latest TV role focuses on a woman coming to terms with the ageing process. She had sharp words for broadcasting bosses who she feels are discriminating against female writers and actors.
"I believe that women my age have very much to say, and unfortunately this business doesn't recognise that, most of the time," said Cattrall, adding that "the pressure to stay young, be young, bubbly, nubile, is suffocating". She also suggested that TV had a long way to go in its roles for older women. "They don't really know what to do with me. I don't want to play someone's wife and become a joke about plastic surgery."
7 Interactive TV shows are more than just a novelty
Transmedia – telling a story across different devices and platforms – has been around a long time as a concept. But there are more and more interesting examples.
Fort McMoney is a Canadian web project focusing on environmental issues, using a mixture of video and gameplay. "The game is a tool to debate," said director David Dufresne. "A lot of people came for the game, and they stayed for the subject."
Another Canadian project, State of Syn, is a sci-fi show that lives on various devices. "It's a series, it's an app, it's a Google Glass game and it's a social experience," said producer Jay Bennett. Meanwhile, Australian crime drama Secrets & Lies gives fans clues through social networks and social TV app Zeebox, to help them solve the crimes.
8 Vice isn't as hip as you might think
Critics often label magazine-turned-media-network Vice as a haven for insufferable hipsters. Actually, it's emerging as an important voice for the teens and twentysomethings who feel ill-served by traditional channels.
Vice's latest online channel is the food-focused Munchies, but the company is also tackling hard news. "People say young people aren't interested in the news around them. It's bullshit," said chief creative officer Eddy Moretti. "Our audience was telling us, 'no, we want news, we want long-form, we want documentaries'," added CEO Shane Smith.
Here, too, environmental activism is to the fore, with a new show called Toxic about climate change. "We can't just have stick-your-head-in-the-sand shit any more. We have to say something. We have to say 'if we don't do something about the environment, we're fucked'," said Smith. "And if we don't say that in media, then shame on us."
9 The second screen is changing talent and game shows
TV talent shows have had viewers voting with their phones for a long time. The next generation of formats takes that further. Israeli show Rising Star, which is now being adapted around the world, separates singers from the studio audience by a video wall, which rises only when enough viewers have voted using the show's app.
Elsewhere, American Idol has been allowing viewers to vote from Google's search engine in its latest series. "We are doing two times the average number of votes we did the previous year, and almost half of them are coming from Google," said Olivier Delfosse of producer FremantleMedia.
10 Monkey Tennis is alive, well, and being pitched in 2014
The spirit of Alan Partridge's famously strange pitches for new TV shows lives on in 2014. Among shows being pitched at MIPTV were Host in the Box, where a presenter is shipped to a mystery location in a box, and has to survive; Rocco to the Rescue, where former porn star Rocco Siffredi helps people in need of "sexual healing"; and Adam Looking for Eve, a dating show where prematched contestants meet on a tropical island. Nude.
Babe Magnet is like Blind Date if the female contestants could reject unsuitable men with a giant magnet; The Shower is a music talent show where contestants sing in an on-stage shower whose temperature is controlled by the audience's app votes; and Dolphins With the Stars pairs celebrities with dolphins for a weekly performance. None of these formats has been made up.
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