YooMedia, DigiTV looking forward..

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Yoomedia
Broadcast (Main)
17 December 2004
14
13970
The man who sees the future.

Under David Docherty, new media's leading visionary,
Yoomedia's turnover is rocketing and the company's
starting to look like a serious interactive rival to BSkyB
BY SUSAN THOMPSON
DAVID jDocherty, Yoomedia's chief executive,
is something of a media clairvoyant.
Even BBC director general Mark
Thompson, and last week the busiest
man in the industry, took the time to tell
Broadcast why he still regularly rings his
old colleague for a forecast.
"What he is thinking about now, the rest
of us will all be thinking about in three or
four years' time," Thompson says.
Alan Yentob, the BBC's creative director,
adds: "David has always been on top
of new technologies. It is uncharted territory
and you need foresight to see and
think ahead. He is very good at imagining
the future."
It's an interesting insight into Docherty,
the former BBC and Telewest executive,
who this month orchestrated Yoomedia's
£28m acquisition of the Digital
Interactive Television Group (DITG) and
The Gaming Channel (TGC), the company
behind betting service Avago and
William Hill's betting channels.
The group is now the biggest interactive
TV company after Sky and the
only one to operate its services on all
platforms - satellite, Freeview, NTL and
Telewest. It will focus on gaming, dating
and chat and the red-button technology
services that were provided by DITG. As
an enlarged entity, Yoomedia has
increased its annual turnover from
around £300,000 to more than £60m.
Not a patch on Sky's £300m plus
turnover but, according to Mathew
Horsman, director of research at consultancy
Mediatique: "Watch this space."
In the next year alone, Docherty hopes
to launch at least one channel - "a dating
channel, because that would complete
our set" - and expand into the US. "It's
a few years behind us in interactive TV
so if you are seen as being one of the
leading players here then you have a
market waiting for you over there."
For Docherty, all of this can't happen
quickly enough. This is a man who, after
all, has been imploring people to jump on
the interactive bandwagon for the best
part of 10 years.
"I was in the BBC when nobody cared
about digital and the possibilities of interactive
TV. I cared about it from 1994.
John [Birt] was great about the internet in
1996 but not digital TV," he says. It was
not until 1998, when Docherty was scheduling
BBC1 and BBC2 as deputy managing
director of television and director
of new media that he said to his then boss,
Will Wyatt, that they should get digital
going. "So we created a team made up of
producers such as Roly Keating and said
we want to create a raft of TV channels.
"We launched UKTV and all the BBC
digital channels. I came up with the idea
for the children's channels CBeebies and
CBBC - it was a fantastic time. We also
did BBC Choice. My original vision for
it was to be interactive. I had convinced
John Birt to sign it off and then the
techies turned round and said that they
couldn't do it yet!"
Thompson puts Docherty's work at the
BBC into context: "So many of the things
that TV is now centring on - the new digital
channels, the idea of interactivity and
using interactive television to build
beyond the main channels - a lot of this
thinking was first developed by David. He
was ahead of his time in many respects."
This reputation is also undoubtedly
why Docherty led one of the hypothetical
pitches this month for Ofcom's proposed
public service publisher (PSP).
Docherty's proposed brand "Six" was the
perfect opportunity for him to let the creative
juices flow. It was also a release: "I
was doing the PSP when I was doing the
[Yoomedia/DITG] deal. It took me out of
the grind of working through the detail
and I liked the idea of doing my own
quixotic bid."
Docherty, who's writing his fourth
thriller and is learning to play the piano
(how does he fit it all in?) says he's "terrified,
even petrified" of regret. "I'm 48
and I hate the idea that I'm going to get to
65 and think: 'If only I'd written that
novel or if only I'd learnt how to play the
piano'." Yet he is happier now than he
has ever been. As interactive TV begins
to come of age, it looks as though this
innovative Scot is coming of age as well.
"If one was doing a profile on David
15 years ago one would have heard accusations
of arrogance, an absolute ability
to believe in one's own rhetoric," says
David Kogan, chief executive of Reel
Enterprises and one of Docherty's PSP
teammates. "Certainly in the past four or
five years there has been a radical change
there - he has learnt to listen a lot more."
The turning point, says Docherty, was
breaking free from the BBC in 2000.
Persuaded by his friend and new chief
executive of Telewest Adam Singer,
Docherty made the move into the commercial
world as managing director of
broadband at the company.
He describes it as being like the "Wild
West" compared with the BBC - and for
the best part of two years he championed
a series of content projects including
"Living Health", an NHS-backed interactive
content pilot. His move into the
commercial world was rewarded when
Yoomedia executive chairman Dr
Michael Sinclair offered him the role of
chief executive. Adam Singer, now a member of the
Ofcom content board, says: "David was
first an academic and then he was a BBC
person. Telewest allowed him to stop
being a public servant and reinvent himself
as a commercial person. He did get a
reputation in the BBC of being quite
angular but at Telewest he worked very
hard at being a team player."
"And," adds Thompson, "when you
add that commercial experience he has
now picked up, it looks like he is going to
be an unstoppable force, really."
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