Beeb 2.0: The BBC Unveils its "Creative Future"

 

14 September 2006

In conjunction with its ongoing two-year charter review process (see "BBC Charter Review: Britain's Plans for Public Media in the Digital Age"), the BBC earlier this year released the details of its Creative Future initiative, a six-year "editorial blueprint" designed to transport the system from its eight-decade broadcast past into the "on-demand" future. "There's a big shock coming," declared BBC Director-General Mark Thompson at the Royal Television Society's Fleming Memorial Lecture in April. "The second wave of digital will be far more disruptive than the first and the foundations of traditional media will be swept away, taking us beyond broadcasting…. On-demand changes everything. It means we need to rethink the way we conceive, commission, produce, package and distribute our content."

Accordingly, ten teams at the BBC spent a year exploring what the media might look like in 2012, what audiences will need and want, and how the BBC can best serve its audience. In the process, the Creative Future project identified 12 areas in which the BBC needed to evolve:

• Re-launching the BBC website to create a more personalized experience, with richer multi-media and more user-generated content.

• Creating a new "teen brand" for broadcast and broadband platforms in order to serve the "audiences of tomorrow" (which "currently get too little of value from the BBC").

• Building broadband portals for key content areas (e.g., sport, music, knowledge building, health and science).

• Commissioning more "360 degree" cross-platform content.

• Shifting energy and resources into continuous news on TV, radio, and broadband and mobile, building around the BBC News 24 channel.

• Improving the quality of sports and entertainment journalism.

• Creating a "single, pan-platform BBC Music Strategy," (in order to become "the premier destination for unsigned bands and to seize the opportunities of broadband, podcasting and mobile").

• Taking entertainment seriously, by learning from the world of video games and experimenting with the commissioning for new platforms.

• Improving the BBC's dramatic offerings, finding "creative space" for outstanding writers while "cherish[ing] the programmes audience love best" (e.g., "EastEnders," "Casualty," and "Holby City").

• Nurturing new comedic talent, re-launching the comedy website, and holding an annual Comedy Day for those involved in creating such programming for the BBC.

• Sharpening the age targets for CBeebies (up to six years old) and CBBC (7 to 11) brands.

• Piloting a Knowledge Building online project called "Eyewitness—History," enabling people to record and share their memories and experiences of any day over the last 100 years.

While there might be more than a little new-media hyperbole in the BBC's Creative Future announcement ("The BBC needs a creative response to the amazing, bewildering, exciting and inspiring changes in both technology and expectations," gushed the BBC's Thompson), at least the system can't be accused of resting on its laurels. And given the size and scope of the BBC's operations--eight TV channels and ten radio networks, whose news division reaches 80 percent of the UK population every week--those laurels are considerable. But as BBC Deputy Director General Mark Byford points out, the BBC audience is changing, and so must the media that serve them. Dividing the audience into "traditionalists, mix-and-matchers, and clickers-and-flickers," Byford notes that "Traditionalists use the main television news programmes and news on their favourite radio station for getting information; mix-and-matchers also access 24-hour news channels, the web and mobiles for news. Clickers and flickers only use 24/7 services including the web for their news. Our research highlights that traditionalists and mix-and-matchers are the dominant groups today. But mix-and-matchers and clickers-and-flickers will be in the majority in five years."

Among the clickers-and-flickers, moreover, are those who desire to "click back" at the media by creating and submitting their own content, a rapidly expanding pool of citizen correspondents who now have a department at the BBC--the User Generated Content Hub--created specifically to develop audience participation and debate, including eyewitness accounts and pictures. "There'd always been a small team running the increasingly popular Have Your Say debates and we'd introduced new software to allow more people to voice their opinions more directly on the website," explains Matthew Eltringham, assistant BBC editor for interactivity. "But first the Asian Tsunami, then the London bombings made it clear that millions of people from all over the world wanted to tell us what they had seen and done and not just what they thought."

On a potentially larger scale, the BBC is also leading a consortium of organizations in a new online archive of multimedia files. Launched in April 2005, the new Creative Archive Licence Group allows users to search for legally cleared TV and radio content, preview and download excerpts and whole programs, modify and create their own versions, and share with others (including the BBC, which is assessing the public's use of its archival material in a six-stage pilot process) on a noncommercial basis. The 18-month pilot project makes available only a small fraction of the BBC's archives, which include some 2 million sound files (300,000 hours), 1.5 million TV programs (600,000 hours, with another 1,000 hours added every month), and 4 million photographs. Currently available files include 80 news reports from the BBC News archives; over 230 clips from the BBC Natural History Unit; regional content from Devon, Cornwall, Lincolnshire and Humberside; and over 100 video clips, audio files and still images especially designed for use in the classroom. The pilot project also includes seven videos from the British Film Institute and over 700 programs from Teachers' TV, and eventually Channel 4 and Open University will also contribute content to the archive.

On another front, the BBC recently completed a trial of its on-demand integrated media player (iMP), which facilitates searching for content (currently limited to the past seven days of radio and TV programming), streaming of media for immediate online use or downloading for later consumption, and the development of a personalized collection of content. It was a limited experiment, to be sure, with severe constraints on the range of material available and the period of time it could be used. But if the BBC ever manages to combine the scope of the Creative Archive with the iMP's ease of use, it will have made a real contribution to bringing public media into the digital age.