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Â鶹Éç's Director of New Media & Technology defines vision for the future
Ashley Highfield, the Â鶹Éç's Director of New Media & Technology, today outlined the key challenges facing the division in a presentation to staff entitled 'Beyond Broadcast' as part of the Â鶹Éç's 'Creative Future' strategy.
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The presentation defined a clear vision for the future. Ashley Highfield says: "Everything
we do here is around technology innovation, to keep the Â鶹Éç relevant in the digital
age."
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All the audience-facing services the division is planning
to launch fall into three main categories: Find, Play and Share.
Internally, all of the initiatives are about transforming the production
process and enabling programme makers.
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Find, Play and Share
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The 'Play' product MyÂ鶹ÉçPlayer - which is to be re-named Â鶹Éç
iPlayer - is subject to a Public Value Test and is being project-led by Tony
Ageh.
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Highfield says: "What Â鶹Éç iPlayer is going to do is
simply offer you catch-up television on your computer, up to seven
days after transmission.
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"At
any time, you'll be able to download any programme from the eight
Â鶹Éç channels and then watch it on your PC and, we hope, move
it across to your TV set or down to your mobile phone, to watch it
when you want.
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"We'll also continue to experiment with different
ways to broadcast live television over the internet and pilot a first
taste of the archive."
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'Find' relates to the next generation of navigation. "Metadata is the information that we hold about our programmes; if we want to unlock the archive, and enable people to search by programme or theme, then we are going to have to have awesome metadata," said Highfield.
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"Unlocking our archive is one of the biggest challenges
we face and, potentially, one of the richest gifts we can give to
the nation.
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"To this end, tomorrow we are publishing an experimental prototype which puts the entire Â鶹Éç programme catalogue onto the Web for the first time, at open.bbc.co.uk/catalogue.
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"This will allow you to find out about any of
the one million programmes that the Â鶹Éç holds in its archive, going
right back to 1937. It's a window onto an amazing cultural and national
resource."
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Nic Newman heads up the project looking at the future of the search service and associated navigation, working closely with Jason
Da Ponte.
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Alongside this is an ambition to radically overhaul
the bbc.co.uk website - a project being led by Tom
Loosemore which
covers all aspects of what the Â鶹Éç offers in the world of Web 2.0.
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The Â鶹Éç Programme Catalogue experiment is overseen
by Loosemore with Julie Rowbotham and Adam
Lee.
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Ashely Highfield adds: "The 'Share' philosophy is at the heart of bbc.co.uk 2.0.
We are looking to a world where you could share Â鶹Éç programmes, your own thoughts,
your own blogs and your own home videos. It allows you to create your own space
and to build bbc.co.uk around you."
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Transform and Enable
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As part of the Â鶹Éç's goal to be fully tapeless by 2010, the Creative Desktop is a new service that will help the Corporation take an important first step towards organisation-wide desktop digital production.
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Â鶹Éç's Chief Technology Officer John Varney, says: "Over the next few years the
Â鶹Éç will revolutionise the way production teams view, share and prepare content.
Our vision is to have a fully open, accessible and interoperable network to enable
production teams to gain access and share assets across the whole of the Corporation."
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Launching this summer, the Creative Desktop will enable programme makers to better prepare content prior to post-production, and will be equipped for sharing and viewing content. It is being overseen by Paul
Cheesebrough, Technology Controller Production, New Media & Technology.
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"In time, we envisage the Creative Desktop to be a fully converged, flexible environment for our production teams to produce content for an on-demand world," continued Varney.
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bbc.co.uk home page
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Â鶹Éç New Media & Technology today announces a competition to re-design and re-imagine the bbc.co.uk home page in the Web 2.0 world.
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The competition (open.bbc.co.uk/reboot) asks individuals not only to re-design the homepage, but also to take it back to the drawing board so that it exploits the functionality and usability of services such as Flickr, YouTube, Technorati and Wikipedia.
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Entrants will also need to think about how their design
will help future users of the site find their way through millions
of pages of content, as well as being able to play and navigate hundreds
of hours of Â鶹Éç Television and Radio.
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Tom Loosemore said: "We've recently started a project to reassess the entire
Â鶹Éç website. Inviting people to contribute via this competition is an essential
component of that work.
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"Given our publicly-funded status, we're delighted
that the open nature of the Web offers the Â鶹Éç's users the chance
to contribute their own ideas directly into the creative process.
It is, after all, their website."
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JH
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