Internet videos on the radio? That’s mad, Ted

Back in 2007, when June Cohen set out to try to interest broadcasters in picking up the video rights to talks hosted by the Ted conference, she didn't have much luck. The former technology journalist and author had been hired to bring the well-regarded but somewhat elitist event – Ted, an acronym for Technology Entertainment Design, had been running conferences since the 1980s – to a wider audience.

“I approached many broadcasters and met resoundingly little interest, with a bit of pity thrown in as well,” she says, laughing.

Seven years later almost 1,800 videos of Ted speeches are available online, and they’ve have been viewed 1.5 billion times. Ted has become a household name. Tedx, an independent licensed platform for people who want to organise their own events along the same principles, generates hundreds of other events around the world. A Tedx event at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre in Dublin this afternoon is sold out.

Ted, whose slogan is “Ideas Worth Spreading”, has become a phenomenon of the postbroadcast digital age. As executive producer of Ted Media, Cohen is responsible for this.

This week Newstalk begins weekly broadcasts of Ted Radio Hour, an audio version of Ted Talks organised along thematic strands such as "happiness". Ted is also moving into book publishing, in partnership with Simon & Schuster, and ted.com is a resource of footnotes and further reading on the subjects explored in the speeches.

If you’ve never seen a Ted Talk the concept is simple: a speaker explains or elaborates on an idea in a speech of no more than 18 minutes before a live audience. The speeches are generally highly polished, often distilling quite complex subjects. “Our initial idea when we launched was that these ideas were too powerful to be limited to a small audience,” says Cohen.

Ted’s early emphasis was on technology and design, reflecting its origins in the pre-internet tech culture of Silicon Valley. Richard Dawkins, Bill Gates, Bono and Bill Clinton are among past speakers. But the most stimulating talks are often from specialists on subjects you mightn’t have heard of before you hit the play button.

One of the more persuasive critiques of the disruption of mass media by the internet suggests that digital technologies and the social web are returning us to the ways people have naturally shared ideas and information for most of human history.

According to this theory, mass media, where the distribution of information is controlled by a small number of companies or individuals, is the aberration. Personalised, socially based storytelling, unconstrained by national borders, is the true norm.

Cohen agrees with this. “The rise of personal storytelling and social media enables a far greater number of people to tell their own stories. Personal, digital media allows for the distribution of different sorts of content. I had no conception of the size of the potential audience. I expected a small, geeky audience, but we got a much larger audience.”

As it has become more successful, Ted has come under attack from some quarters. A US academic, Benjamin Bratton, criticised the organisation (through a Ted Talk) as "middlebrow, megachurch infotainment"; others argue that the slick 18-minute videos reduce complex ideas to the language and tone of a business pitch.

Cohen responds that “it’s not possible to do anything valuable without getting criticism . . . In structuring the talks we actively discourage people from dumbing down.”

She argues that Ted enables communication and understanding across disciplines, and she quotes Albert Einstein: “Things should be made as simple as possible. But no simpler.”

As for Ted Radio Hour, the shows reshape the talks into a form appropriate to the medium, she says. "Most of the ideas are delivered primarily through words. We think very deeply about the translation of the talks, the parts of them that translate well."

Having been turned down by traditional broadcasters several years ago, it seems strange for Ted to be moving into those channels now. But Cohen argues that it’s a logical extension of Ted’s objective of reaching as big an audience as possible.

“If you want to reach the largest number of people, it won’t be through online video. It will be through radio and audio.”

Ted Radio Hour will be broadcast every Sunday at 6pm on Newstalk