Find, Play, Share: The BBC’s Creative Future

Sorry this is late coming to the blog, but with travel to Montreal and then my presentation, I’ve not been able to get around to writing this till now.

The BBC has been working on a year-long project to assess what it needs to do to adapt to the future – dubbed the “Creative Future” project. It’s a triple play project, looking at online, radio and television.

I’ve been involved in looking at participation within the journalism sphere (News being my ‘home’ division of course).

It’s been a real interesting project to follow, with a number of useful and interesting events – one even included my Dad coming into the BBC to talk about his blog (he’s going to make some kind of appearance at the We Media conference, I think, too).

Anyway the results and conclusions have been published, which you can read about in the BBC Press Release. However the headlines for our industry are as follows:

• Relaunch the bbc.co.uk website (dubbed bbc.co.uk 2.0, urgh!)
• Launch video on-demand over IP player as BBC iPlayer
• More metadata (Yes, I could kiss Mark Thompson!)
• Continuous news over broadband

However…

“The BBC should no longer think of itself as a broadcaster of TV and radio and some new media on the side. We should aim to deliver public service content to our audiences in whatever media and on whatever device makes sense for them, whether they are at home or on the move.

…was an interesting quote from Mark Thompson which I think sums up very much the direction many of us in BBC New Media have been pushing for.

The announcement has been covered widely in the media, including a much-cited Media Guardian story. Despite what hte Guardian are saying, as far as I know I don’t think the BBC is going to do a MySpace. I don’t see what value it would bring considering there are already many people out there doing this kind of thing successfully already – er, like MySpace. Also I don’t think the BBC would want do deal with the controversy – which would be amplified becuase of the trusted nature of the BBC.

Instead, I think the BBC is wanting to recreate some of the personalisation and socialness of MySpace around it’s content offering, which seems far more appropriate and workable to me.