Ashley Highfield, the director of new media & technology at the BBC, gave a great speech about the evolution of media. Key ideas:
As broadcasters and programme makers, we should help bring forward this world where the viewer is in control. It will help sustain interest in TV which otherwise runs the risk of being seen as increasingly flat and inflexible not least by the PlayStation generation. We should create more programmes that come with the meta-data, the tags in the programme that allow it to be chopped up and consumed piece meal by the viewer. We should perhaps even create shorter programmes!It's also becoming obvious to us that what we think of us as quality programming might need to be refined in the light of audience experience. For example, audiences might be willing to sacrifice full screen, high picture quality TV for a more highly localized, personalisable, timely service: the news, events and local gossip in your town, delivered through digital TV. We are currently working on just such a digital TV pilot to see if we can use our 50 local radio stations to bring digital TV news, focused not just on large regions like 'BBC South,' but on your specific county 'Hampshire', then your town, 'Eastleigh', then even more personal -- your local community. The point is you choose the focus. Could this ultra local TV be the shape of local newsprogrammes to come?
And this is where the Creative Archive , which Greg [Dyke] announced in Edinburgh , comes in. As it is both part of our charter obligation to make our archive available where possible and practicable, and part of our online consent to act as an essential resource offering wide ranging, unique content, it is through iMP, that pieces of our content could be retrieved from our archive, downloaded, and used for personal use.
We are exploring legitimate peer-to-peer models to get our users to share our content, on our behalf, amongst themselves, transparently. [This is very much in keeping with what I've been on the phone about this morning]
Some of his ideas, such as the notion of "ambient TV" stretch the notion of useful media to the extreme. We may watch and do other things simultaneously, but the idea that TV can be designed as a sort of subtext opens all sorts of nefarious mental pathways that we went down with the arguments about subliminal advertising in the 1960s. We needn't repeat all the mistakes made in the past just because they have a new context.
Also, don't think of a digital Britain, think of a digital world. Make the dialog larger than your local nation-state.
Thanks for the link to Kevin Werbach.
Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe at October 8, 2003 11:41 AM | TrackBack