The Modern Journalist

6 Reasons the BBC Gets the Web

I’ve loved the BBC for many years.

If I had a dream job it would living somewhere in England working with their digital teams and thinking up new ways to get people information. They are the model for what should be done.

Before we go any farther down the line, I realize their business and management structure makes them different from its U.S. counterparts in the same way I realize that our financial structure at MIT’s Technology Review made us a bit different than traditional newspapers.

I hear you. I really do.

My response is this: if you hear a new idea and think of all the reasons it won’t work, you’re doomed to failure; if you hear a new idea and think of all the ways you could implement them in your business, you’ll never fail.

Now that I have that out of my system, I want to talk about some of ways the BBC has gotten this whole modern media thing correct:

Innovation Labs: The BBC understands that if it wants to not only stay relevant, but relevant ahead of the curve, it’s important for the corporation to foster and encourage innovation. To do this, they launched the Innovation Labs. The BBC offers financial incentives for independent technologists and companies to submit proposals to the BBC. The best 10 teams are selected to attend one of their four confabs, where people smash ideas off each other and build — one would assume — partnerships and prototypes.

This is the equivalent of Google requiring employees to spend one day a week working on a project of their own or the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon bringing together disparate talent groups (writers, actors, programmers, AI coders, network engineers) in a graduate program to build virtual worlds.

Without mother necessity, where would be.

Customizing the Internet: The BBC realized that it’s best to let people decided how — and what kind of — news they wanted to see. That’s a big, huge deal in the world of the new media. Editors and reporters are absolutely loathe to allow someone else to determine what is important. Heck, even some readers thought the BBC lost its way by allowing people — regular people — to determine what they wanted to read.

Not so says the BBC’s Richard Titus, Head of User Experience.

Some suggested this indicates that the BBC no longer has a voice or knows what it wants to say. I disagree.

Customization is about collaborating with our audience. As a linear broadcast medium, the web is no better and in many ways far worse than other mediums. The web’s power comes from several key strengths…

The Idea of the iPlayer: Frankly, anyone that uses Apple’s “i” pre-fix makes me giggle; however, my personal preference for computers is beside the point. The BBC made a determination to build a streaming service for its programs. Sure they made some mistakes (using DRM, and Microsoft DRM at that), but they get kudos for starting the process in 2004, long before most broadcast companies were prepared to release their material online.

81 Years of Archives: The history of digital technology is simple: nothing ever goes out of style. While some just discovered this a few years ago, that notion has been the hallmark for most innovation. The BBC just announced it would soon have an archive of every television and radio program in its history.

Did I mention that the archive will be freely available for anyone.

For those who follow and live with technology, the announcement is a “its’ about time”; however, most people aren’t like us. The fact that the largest broadcasting corporation in the world would do that is a benchmark along the digital timeline.

A Website for Every Show: Along with an archive, the company is going to build a show — complete with information and clips — for each program. Holy smokes. They are going to need a team of designers to pull that off, but in the long term they will be far better positioned in the digital world than any other media company in the world.

I <3 the BBC.

The New Business Model: Free, you say. That’s not a sustainable model. Which is true, except that it’s not. With great databases comes great financability.  Yes, I made that up. The BBC has already struck a five-year deal with record label EMI. The deal will provide every television and radio broadcast by an EMI artist to the label, which it can use in any way.

It’s the products and service model, not the banner model.