Skillset Blog

With Beijing just around the corner, my thoughts turn to our own time in the spotlight. One of my jobs at Skillset is to make sure that the creative media industry is competition fit to make the most of the opportunities when the greatest show on earth rolls into East London. Already some companies are stretching their muscles and practicing their moves - a few emails already asking “how do I win some media work in 2012?”.And this is not an easy question to answer. It must be remembered that we are only the “host” nation. It’s not our Olympics - it is firmly the domain of the International Olympic Committee. It’s their party; we just give them the space. This continues to the broadcasting arm - whilst the BBC are rights-holders, the Olympic Broadcasting Service are the key players, responsible for (amongst other things):

What will this mean for jobs for our industry? Will the OBS come into town and hire an army of freelancers, or sub-contract big chunks out? What about the other Rights holders - NBC for example have already told us that they expect to crew up locally rather than fly in an army of their own talent (with the exchange rate the way it is, and the cost of hotels in our capital city, and the fact that we have the best talent in the first place, you can see why) - who does average company need to speak to to win some contracts? And the largest area of growth is all the other content needed - from the non-official sports journalist to conference spaces to the Cultural activities planned. All this will mean lots of work creating, manipulating and distributing content.

Four years is a long time away in our business, of course, but now is the time for planning. We at Skillset will be publishing some research soon regarding the areas of growth in our sector because of the impact of the Games, and I am off to experience first-hand the scale of the media frenzy in Beijing (and will blog here - if the Great firewall of China lets me). When our Mayor accepts the torch it signals that it is now London’s turn to host the games - and the countdown to our own future starts in earnest.

Ready… Steady… Go!

This entry was posted on Monday, July 28th, 2008 at 4:06 pm and is filed under Facilities, Interactive, Skillset. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but we reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.