It's not new, but it's new to me

I have spoken before about content creation in the media, referring specifically to children's television as an example.  I made a point that content generation wasn't dropping because the market no longer existed, but rather that demand was returning to an organic level free from over saturation.

No matter what niche you are interested in, for most people at some point it will go mainstream and become over saturated.  After a while the growth stagnates and the mainstream interest moves on and your interest returns to being niche again.

This has happened a lot and today when you switch on a TV - which I avoid as I use catch up services instead - you will see a lot of programming that's all very similar.  This in part is due to the fact that networks have moved away from creating something new and moved into finding something new.  The distinction here being in years gone by, a network would pilot programmes and run a limited number of episodes and pick up the ones that do well for further production.  That doesn't happen as much anymore instead they use market research to find out what people like and then create content centred around that.  This discards the idea that people can like something they haven't seen or thought about before, and perpetuates the idea that you need to regurgitate what already exists.

If you are going to do this and not risk creating something completely new then I have a better suggestion.  Revive older shows.  I don't mean looking through your own back catalogue and picking something out, I mean looking at what people have seen before and reviving what they haven't.  We are an ever increasingly global society but that globalisation is not retrospective.  I can name several old TV shows from the UK like 2.4 Children which people in the UK will have heard of [some younger readers perhaps not] but people in other countries will not.  Likewise there will be old TV shows from those countries that no-one will have heard of in the UK - the majority at least.  This creates the assertion, it's not new, but it's new to me - or to be more precise, it's not new, but it will be something your viewers haven't seen before.

You don't have to rebroadcast the old shows, which I know some networks would be wary of as they think they look dated - you can remake the show in its entirety, the scripting etc will already be done for you all you need is a refresh of some references to bring it up to date and push it out again.  As for the criticism of the remake against the old versions, only those who have seen it before - who are not the target audience - would be likely to criticise.  The remainder will be subjective or objective as the case may be.

This extends far beyond TV into many other areas of our lives however.  We tend to think of our past as something that we have been through and forget about - save for a few choice moments or particularly traumatic experiences; but when you meet someone for the first time you know nothing about their past and everything they have been through and the same goes for them and you.  What you tell one another and choose to share isn't new to you and might even be quite boring to you now, but it's new to them and you will often find they think it's fascinating.  The reason being we think we all go through the same experiences but we don't and even when something happens we both experience, the way we deal with it or react to it varies.  What you did next is often more interesting than what happened in the first place.

So like TV networks and the media in general, don't try and appeal to what people like because you'll find they are so often bored of it because they have seen it all before.  Be yourself and do what you like to do and share the things you used to do and used to love as much as you share what you do now, because your past is old to you but it's new to me.  So don't be afraid to be different or do something which is not mainstream because people will respond to it.  Things which are different stand out more than the things that are the same.  As I said in other posts we are conditioned when young to think this is bad and then told the opposite as we get older.  Learning to accept this as you get older can be hard but it's the way you should have been all along.  They say with age you reach a point where you stop giving a fuck and be yourself whether people like it or not - that point is when you realise who likes you for being you.