Last Friday was iPlayer Day, an event on the BBC Internet Blog organised by myself, Nick Reynolds and Jonathan Richardson.
It was my first major contribution as a BBC employee since starting. Nick added his thoughts on his own blog here, but I thought I’d add some other thoughts in addition. I say addition as I pretty much agree with what Nick has said.
1. Video. I love video on the web — but something didn’t quite sit with our contributions. With a little while between the inception of iPlayer Day (it was planned before I arrived) and the actual day itself, I feel the luxury was a little too comfortable.
Compare it to, for example, a footballer lining up to take a shot. Often, the longer he has to tee it up, the more likely he is to fluff it. Same for cricketers who gather high catches. With so long to think about something, it is only natural to over-think — and miss.
We were caught between a rock and a hard place. Do we create video that was rough and ready, gritty, had tinny audio and wobbly-ish composition? Or do we create professionally shot ‘interviews’? In retrospect, I think we should have gone with the first option. It’s what our readers expected.
And then, of course, in an overwhelming determination to impress, I forgot the basics. Something I don’t feel I’ve done ever since I went to do an interview for our local paper without a pen.
2. Social media. Social media lovers are strange beasts, aren’t they? I should know, I am one. It’s hard to know how we would be able to harness the web 2.0 world, given that a) It’s harder for a MSM company (or corporation in this case) to appeal to the charity-style of contributions found in social media and b) There wasn’t much incentive for contributions other than mild discussion.
A day or two before the event, I believed we’d secured an incentive. A top BBC figure was going to answer Twitter questions. We were to record the clip and post it online — all within an hour.
By Thursday, for various reasons, that incentive was gone. As a result, I feel our social media input ranged from predictable (“I’m a Mac user, and I hate you”) to the nice (and appreciated) but rather mundane (“I love iPlayer!”). I’d have liked a little bite to some of the submissions — and I believe giving the opportunity to pose questions via Twitter would have been our headline moment of the day.
Above all, I feel I let myself down when it came to social media promises. In our initial brainstorm, we chucked around ideas that were exciting, and very d0-able. So far so good. But various ideas for mash-ups and interactivity were quashed by limitations. Given the chance to do all this again, I’d be far more conservative — not because I couldn’t deliver what was promised, but because in the situation they were to be placed, they weren’t deliverable. There are many reasons — but take the ability to use Google and YouTube out of the equation, and mash-ups are much more difficult.
3. Journalism or PR? I was both, I think. The thing is, it was clear from the offset that iPlayer is an immensely popular product. It has done for on-demand video what the iPod did for MP3 players. People don’t say ‘have you got an mp3 player?’ they say ‘have you got an iPod?’. There are adverts all over the Tube for audiobooks which read “Download for your iPod or MP3 player”. They are, of course the same thing. iPlayer is now in that realm.
So the battle was already won. We didn’t have to convince anybody. The teams involved in iPlayer have done extraordinarily good jobs in the past year — and so are very proud.
The by-product of all this happiness and iPlayer-lovin’, of course, is that the blog content read like reams to reams of good PR. It wasn’t intended that way — over my dead body etc — but it was hard not to be over-positive about something that has been such a roaring success.
But I still think I could have applied my journalism hat a little more. Had I been a little more cutthroat, I would have cut the beginning and the end of the video with Anthony Rose, head of online media, and just included a short clip of him talking about iPlayer 3.0. That’s what people had come to see.
The fact lots of exciting information about how iPlayer 3.0 would be social media-based has passed a lot of bloggers and journalists by — and I think the format of the video is to blame: The first six minutes or so consistent of Anthony talking generally about the service. In the video, Anthony spoke about Broadcast 1.0. Well I think the manner of the clips we used were Web 1.0. In future, I’d have much preferred to find him at his desk, ask him two questions, and upload it to the web before I’d even returned to my chair. That’s Web 2.0. That’s exciting media.
But in hindsight, we were all learning. I was learning about high-quality production values — mistakes made on Friday were flagged before I’d noticed. This isn’t something I’m used to, but something I’m feeling increasingly humbled to be a part of. Many people within the BBC were coming forward to point out mistakes. Not because they were being picky, or harsh, but because it’s their BBC too. And they’re not going to let everyone else’s hard work in maintaining the respect of the BBC be let down by me putting in a broken link.
I was learning about how the BBC is put together. Who’s in charge of what, who reports to who. Indeed, in this respect I was well and truly tied. I didn’t know who did what — and there was little time to find out.
