Speaking at Videoscape Europe in London last week, Channel 4’s outgoing head of its All 4 digital service outlined ten common mistakes made by companies working in this space and offered a number of ways to avoid them.

Over-confidence and impatience were two of the ten mistakes that he flagged. Taking attention away from problems that can’t be fixed quickly means businesses cannot focus on solving big, intractable problems.

Davidson-Houston argued that while content needs to be ‘king-like’, content alone is not enough. “If you work in an organisation where the religion is ‘content is king,’ that is a conceptual mistake”.

Another major point was that broadcasters should treat VOD as a fully-formed businesses in its own right, not as a tech project: “It’s a huge catastrophic mistake to see it as one and it will make your business less competitive.”

The discipline of curating large-scale VOD platforms, he argued, has more to do with experimentation and mastery than it does with innovation and bosses need to value the people who are mastering these skills.

In terms of organisational structure, Davidson-Houston said that research and product teams should not be separated as they’re inextricably linked. Similarly, companies should not choose between strategy and implementation.

The key to hiring new talent, he added, is to find people who can learn and are able to teach themselves.

Decision making was flagged as crucial, as bad decisions can usually be superseded by good decisions – the key is to make a distinction between those that are reversible and irreversible. “I’m paraphrasing Jeff Bezos but, generally speaking, the cost of not making a decision is likely to exceed the cost of making the wrong decision.”

Strategically, broadcasters should be “fishermen” not “shepherds”, he said. They should not merely be herding people from broadcast channels to on-demand services, as this audience is both reducing in size and getting older, thus becoming less valuable.

“The thing about fishermen is they acquire. Most broadcasters that I know, especially those high up the EPG, have a bit of an issue here, because they’ve never had to learn how to acquire a customer.”

Discussing how best to avoid these mistakes, Davidson-Houston said that you need power in four main areas: having financial power; having staff and being able to move them around without asking permission; being able to design processes yourself; and being able to sit everyone together.

However, with this power you should not lead a rebellion against your own company. “You may be right but you’ll be dead in the water, absolutely finished,” he said. “Lead, be luminous, be the hope, bring people with you, love the incumbent business – it’s probably paying your wages.”

When it comes to dealing with bosses, he encouraged people to engage them early. “Take your work to them before it’s finished. Don’t transact with them. Don’t tell them ‘here’s my work, please mark it’. Say here’s what my work is going to become. It’s not finished. Please, would you be involved?”

Last week’s keynote came after Davidson-Houston announced in May that he is stepping down from Channel 4 in the summer after 12 years at the UK broadcaster. “It’s time to get stuck in to something new,” he said in a statement at the time, without revealing what he plans to do next.

He joined Channel 4 from Microsoft in 2007, was Head of Channel 4 Online from 2010, and launched video-on-demand service All 4 as Head of All 4 in 2015.

Videoscape Europe is the strategy event for D2C, SVOD, AVOD and vPayTV, with a focus on delivering profitable growth in premium digital video. You can find more details here.

Davidson-Houston joined Channel 4 from Microsoft in 2007, was Head of Channel 4 Online from 2010, and launched video-on-demand service All 4 as Head of All 4 in 2015.

Under his leadership All 4 has evolved from a catch-up service for Channel 4 programmes to a service that offers a mix of live TV, catch-up, box sets and archive content. All 4 now also hosts content from partners such as Adult Swim, Vice and Walter Presents.

“It’s time to get stuck in to something new,” said Davidson-Houston in a statement, without revealing what he plans to do next.

“Channel 4 has been part of my life for a long time. I’m happy that I’m leaving All 4 in good shape and wish my colleagues all the best for the future.”

Channel 4’s Director of Programmes, Ian Katz, said: “Richard has played the pivotal role in building All 4 into a hugely successful on demand service that punches well above its weight. He has been a key figure in shaping the channel’s response to the digital challenge and will be much missed.”

Channel 4 claims that All 4 is now available on more than 20 platforms in the UK and has over 20 million registered users, including over two-thirds of the country’s 16-34 year olds. It also said that the service saw double-digit growth in viewing last year.

Richard Davidson-Houston spoke at the Connected TV World Summit in March, where he highlighted the importance of curation and scheduling as part of a keynote presentation titled ‘How established media owners will maintain audiences in the age of hyper-competition’.

Delivering a keynote titled ‘How established media owners will maintain audiences in the age of hyper-competition’, the head of Channel 4’s All 4 on-demand service ran through an A-Z of ideas.

Stressing the importance of curation, Davidson-Houston said that familiarity, rather than new content, is both the biggest driver of viewers’ intention to watch and an enormous challenge, noting that boxsets are important for driving retention as viewers become invested in completing series.

He also claimed that linear scheduling remains “the most important recommendation engine in all of media” and is something that has a huge impact on the consumption of on-demand video.

“Partnering with niche verticals can bring new audiences to platforms that wouldn’t otherwise have come,” he said, citing Channel 4’s international-focused drama service Walter Presents and its content partnership with Adult Swim.

However, he criticised the industry for being “incredibly bad at reaching out and finding other people around the world” to forge partnerships with.

“I can’t go global, I work for a state-owned commercially-funded broadcaster,” he said. “But we can all go global if we buddy up with other people in other markets.”

In terms of brand building and aggregation, he described the latter as battle between the economic or strategic compulsion of being aggregated by a big tech platform and the difficulty of making a brand cut through in that environment.

For smaller brands to continue to have meaning in an online world populated by tech giants, he said they must be “amphibious,” able to be at home in linear, over-the-top, social and even areas like podcasting.

YouTube is a marketing platform and a “means to an end” for broadcasters, according to Davidson-Houston. “It’s a confusing means to an end because often that marketing takes the form of publishing content and sometimes we monetise the content.”

Elsewhere, Davidson-Houston was critical of paying too much credence to ‘HiIPPOS’, an acronym that means the “highest paid person’s opinion,” or people that base their strategic thinking on their own children’s media consumption.

Experimentation was deemed important, with companies encouraged to “play like a jazz band” by innovating and taking risks. However, virtual reality was dismissed as “basically a distraction” and “nothing to do with broadcasting”.