20 May 2013 - Aula Magna of the Universitat de València

• Audiovisual lives uncertainty moments as a consequence of the economical crisis. For many people, the crisis has demonstrated the structural problems of a sector that, arguably, has not grown orderly. There are people who speak about the “audiovisual bubble” to refer to the development of a model understood as a failure from the industrial point of view, but also from the cultural and social point of view.
• The audiovisual sector is shocked by how the crisis is developing, specially for the difficulties for funding projects, with the corresponding halt in terms of production and destruction of working positions. 
• The period of crisis should be used by society to re-think the audiovisual system in a way that state television has a central position in which it can become the motor of audiovisual industry. Public television in Spain is one of Europe’s worst funded televisions.
• Proximity public televisions only make sense when they offer localised contents, which are not politicised and respond to the needs of the citizenship.
• It is necessary to look for stable funding formulas for the public and private televisions to coexist instead of compete for resources which are more exiguous each time while social influence and, consequently, publicity, is moving towards the Internet and the big companies of digital communication.
• Televisions must know how to adapt to the crisis without social or cultural costs. The Internet must be an allied of the channels and not a competitor. Live television will only be used in very specific cases and the “à-la-carte” consumption will prevail. This is why it is necessary to enable a social majority to have access to the net.
• Some of the changes favoured by the economical crisis have to do with the appearance and consolidation of new funding formulas that are allowing the production of audiovisual projects outside the institutional channels, which are looking for new untold stories or for the same old stories but told in a different way. New ideas and tools are appearing: social networks or mobile devices.
• It is necessary to diversify the market, to know the client and the audience, as well as to internationalise the production. It is necessary to consolidate an industrial structure which nowadays is very precarious.
• In order to go outside and position in a better position to confront the crisis, it is necessary to make an great effort and invest in talent, creativity, values that are not given the strategic importance they have.