BBC Outlines its Interactive TV Plans for 2008/2009

--Round-Up of Recent BBC Interactive and Broadband TV News

In its latest "Statements of Programme Policy" document, the BBC has
outlined its plans for its BBCi interactive TV service in 2008 and 2009.
Perhaps most notably, those plans include exploring the use of IP to
enhance single-screen interactive TV content. The document lays out
the plans in five key areas:

• ”Sustaining citizenship and civil society." BBCi plans to strengthen
  its journalism offering by improving the production quality of both the
  news and sports videos it offers in its News Multiscreen application,
  and by adding more content to that app. In addition, as part of the UK's
  digital switchover, BBCi will migrate priority Ceefax text pages, such
  as Flight Arrivals and Agricultural Prices, to the service "to ensure that
  viewers continue to have access to this highly valued public service
  content." Finally, BBCi will continue to support BBC journalism in its
  coverage of elections, parliamentary events (e.g. the Budget) and key
  news stories, by providing in-depth explanation via the News
  Multiscreen and via 24/7 digital text content.
• "Promoting education and learning." BBCi will "maintain its current
  commitment to education and learning, including redeveloping the
  children's permanent services and program enhancements."
• "Stimulating creativity and cultural excellence." BBC Audio & Music
  will this year increase its use of BBCi to make available exclusive
  music sessions and coverage of national events, such as Glastonbury
  and the Proms. In addition, BBCi will aggregate all interactive sports
  content (audio-visual, pictures and text) to provide "a permanent
  presence for sports" (see below).
• "Bringing the UK to the world and the world to the UK." In time for
  the Beijing Olympics, BBCi will launch an updated sports section,
  offering news and results and featuring video from BBC Sport. The
  new sports section will continue to be offered after the Olympics, under
  the brand, Mysportnow.
• "Delivering the benefit of emerging communications technologies."
  Goals for this key area include making BBCi available on the UK's new
  vFreesat platform; launching the BBC iPlayer on various TV platforms,
  with the red button as the primary access point; exploring the use of IP
  to enhance the quality and impact of interactive TV content;
  establishing a single set of IPTV standards in order to enable cost-
  effective publication of content; and maintaining the improved
  performance that the BBC says BBCi delivered last year.

The "Statements of Programme Policy" document also provides
information on the BBC's plans for bbc.co.uk. According to the
document, those plans include offering a live, streaming feed of BBC
One; creating "a dynamic underlying architecture and a new identity,
rating and recommendation system which will form the basis of
personalization on all platforms"; increasing "the availability of video
and audio content on mobile devices"; supporting "programming that
encourages community participation (for example, for the show, "Choir
Wars," BBC One will "use the Web and mobile to bring people
together each week as ‘flashmobs’ in different locations across the
UK"); and providing a Web page for every BBC program (note: in a
speech she delivered at the Banff Television Festival earlier this month,
Jana Bennett, director of BBC Vision, stated that the BBC is looking to
provide a Web page for every episode of its programs going back
nearly 80 years; the pages would enable end-users to launch episodes
wherever those episodes were available on the Web, and would
function as a searchable database of BBC programming). The full text
of the "Statements of Programme Policy" is available at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/info/statements2008/pdf/BBC_SoPPs_200809.pdf

In other BBC news:

• The corporation announced late last month that its BBC iPlayer has
  now received over 75 million requests to stream or download programs,
  and that the service experienced another month of strong growth in
  April: according to the BBC, the total number of requests for
  downloads and streams of BBC programs in April was 21 million, up
  from 17.2 million in March and representing month-on-month growth
  of 20%. In addition, the corporation says, average weekly users of the
  iPlayer totaled 1.4 million in April, up from 1.1 million in March and
  approximately double January's average of 750,000 users; and the
  average daily number of requests to download or stream programs via
  the iPlayer rose to 700,000 in April (compared to around 550,000 in
  March and 360,000 in January). The BBC says that "Doctor Who" and
  "The Apprentice" were the most requested programs on the iPlayer in
  April, and that programs from its younger-skewing channel, BBC
  Three, were also popular, with six BBC Three programs among the
  top-20 most requested (note: according to the BBC, the BBC Three
  comedy, "Gavin and Stacey," received around 250,000 requests from
  April 19th to 25th "on top of a weekly reach of three million,
  suggesting that certain programs have the potential to significantly
  increase share through BBC iPlayer"). The corporation also says that
  programs requested through the iPlayer that "lie outside the top 20
  programs account for over a quarter of total consumption," which, it
  claims, suggests "a long-tail effect in action." Additionally, in the first
  two weeks of May, the average number of requests to view rose to
  716,000, the BBC says, and May 18th saw over 900,000 requests to
  view by over 390,000 users. The BBC also claims that the demographic
  breakdown of iPlayer users shows the service's broad appeal to
  audiences, with 16-34's at 37%, 35-54's at 43% and 55+'s at 21%. The
  corporation also revealed that Apple Macintosh users accounted for
  10% of iPlayer usage and iPhone and iPod Touch users for 3%.
• Last month, the corporation offered a red-button service that gave
  viewers the option of watching its coverage of the FA Cup Final
  between Cardiff City and Portsmouth with a Welsh-language
  commentary from BBC Radio Cymru's "Camp Lawn" program. "We're
  very pleased that Radio Cymru commentary is available through the
  red button," Sian Gwynedd, editor of Radio Cymru, said in a prepared
  statement. "The fact that the commentary is available throughout
  Britain means that Welsh-speakers, wherever they are, can get Radio
  Cymru commentary whilst watching the biggest game in the history of
  Cardiff City Football Club since 1927."
• The corporation says that the embedded media player it launched on
  its news and sports Web sites in April, and which embeds video and
  audio clips within story pages on the sites, so that users can access the
  content more easily and share it with their friends, has helped increase
  plays and daily unique users by over 50%. On bbc.co.uk/news, for
  example, the average number of daily unique users of audio and video
  has risen from 528,000 to 762,000, while average daily plays of content
  have increased from 636,000 to 978,000, the corporation says; and
  clickthroughs (i.e. where a user chooses to access audio or video from a
  text story page) are up from an average of 2.5% to 20%, with some
  stories as high as 90%. The most trafficked videos, according to the
  BBC, have included footage of the Burma cyclone (248,000 views on
  May 6th) and a report on a Facebook flaw (303,000).
• The BBC Wales-produced Web site for the BBC's long-running
  science fiction series, "Doctor Who," recently launched an application,
  dubbed "Trailer Maker," that enables viewers to mix video clips,
  images, sound effects and music tracks to create their own "Doctor
  Who" trailer. The application's clips and sounds are updated on a
  weekly basis so that viewers can interact with the latest content from
  the current series of the show. The app builds on a similar app, dubbed
  "Comic Maker," that allowed viewers to make their own comics and
  that was nominated for a BAFTA award. "With nearly 40,000 comics
  already published from the Comic Maker feature, we thought it was
  time we pushed things even further and offered fans a chance to get
  creative with video," Web site producer, Rob Francis, said in a
  vprepared statement. "Users of the site have always been incredibly
  imaginative and we're extremely keen to encourage more of that
  creativity. Hopefully the Trailer Maker is something we can develop in
  the future to offer users many more exciting possibilities."
  User-generated trailers will be stored on the "Doctor Who" Web site for
  six months and each assigned a unique code, so that users can share
  their creations with friends and family.
• The BBC iPlayer has launched on the EPG of UK cable operator,
  Virgin Media, providing the latter's 3.5 million subscribers with
  catch-up access to around 350 hours of BBC programming from the
  past seven days. The service is offered free of charge. The iPlayer has
  actually been available on Virgin Media since the end of April--though
  until now it had to be accessed by pressing the red button while
  watching a BBC channel. The BBC is hoping that its availability on the
  EPG will increase its usage. "We have always envisaged BBC iPlayer
  on a TV platform and in the livingroom and are delighted that, by
  working with Virgin Media, this ambition has today been realized,"
  Ashley Highfield, the BBC's outgoing director of future media and
  technology, said in a prepared statement. "This partnership takes us a
  step closer to transforming the way our audiences watch TV. It also
  further underlines our commitment to making BBC iPlayer a
  multiplatform offering that appeals to a wide range of audiences."
  Virgin Media claims that 47% of its customers regularly use its VOD
  service, and that, over the past year, the number of views per customer
  has grown from 10 to 23 per month. It also claims that the service
  generated 99 million views in the last three months of 2007.