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INTERVIEW: BBC general manager for news and knowledge on connected TVs
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The BBC is radically rewriting its approach to the digital world, trimming down its sprawling network of websites to 10 streamlined 'products', an umbrella term which includes everything from BBC radio to the iPlayer. Responsible for Homepage, Search, News, Sport, Weather, CBBC, CBeebies, Knowledge and Learning and 2012 Olympics coverage, Phil Fearnley explains how the BBC is reaching out to audiences across different platforms under its new approach.
¤ You've hailed connected TVs as the future of television. How will the BBC embrace this?
During any one week, we get somewhere between 10m and 13m people in the UK accessing our red button services. Those aren’t really genuinely connected TVs in the way that IP-delivered connectivity allows, so we see a huge potential in migrating those people who are familiar with red button services to being consumers of each of our 10 products in the digital world. We see opportunity not just in how a service is connected via the broadcast stream to another piece of content, but actually that we create complementary services that run alongside TV and radio programming.
We’ve already done a number of trials – for example, Autumn Watch. We know audiences absolutely love sending in photos, videos, asking questions, tweeting about the programme – we’re making that an easier activity to do, aligning the broadcast stream of content with the input. And we’ve been doing the same where people interact with game shows and quiz shows. I think the ability to create wholly new formats is an area which is, at the moment, underexploited because we’ve not had the opportunity to test these things at scale. We’re doing a lot of R&D activity at the moment on what might work and what our audiences might like, but it’s a bit early to say what the next new, big thing is going to be.
¤ So you see complementary streams of information becoming more common?
Yes - with sport it’s easier to see how you can watch the video stream and you can be surfing the web on your tablet or your smartphone. There’s no reason why those couldn’t come closer together, so you get the data overlay on top of the video, using that as a way of navigating between streams of content. There are some really quite interesting things there that we’ve demonstrated for the Olympics that we’re looking at, where you can seamlessly switch between channels based on information on one channel, giving you a much deeper, richer experience about the content that you’re watching.
¤ Now that Google TV will rival YouView, how will the connected TV landscape develop?
There is already competition in the market – if you look at connected TVs as opposed to TVs that have IP built into them. If you look at the games consoles, whether it’s a PS3, a Wii or an Xbox, between them there are over 10m homes that are connectable if not necessarily connected at different times. The challenge for us is to make it compelling enough for people to interact and engage with the programmes and services that we’re offering. I don’t think the industry has been terribly smart about that.
My sense is that [Google] haven't been entirely successful in its launch to date in the US, but they’re not going to go away – they’ll carry on, and they will become successful at some point. The marketplace is competitive. Our challenge is trying to ensure, from an audience perspective, that irrespective of what device you are accessing our services on, the user experience is broadly the same. When you see the number of devices out there and the competition, we can’t justify the cost of building bespoke services for everybody. We have a remit to deploy to as wide an audience base as we can, so our challenge is one of user experience at the front end and cost mitigation and standardisation of service at the back end.
¤ Do you see Google TV as a potential partner?
I’m not close enough to the conversations with Google at the moment to pass comment on where we are. My understanding of the nature of the proposition that Google TV have provided is that, actually, they’re not a service provider in that they’re not streaming channels like Virgin and Sky, but they are actually providing an application interface, and we will definitely be providing services into that kind of Android-based interface.
¤ What are the roles of mobile and tablets?
In the last 18 months, we’ve gone through a bit of a watershed organisationally. We saw the platform as a separate thing almost, and now we’ve flipped that on its head and we’ve seen that the product is the thing that is consistent from our audience’s eyes. Our new product, for instance, needs to deliver over four screens seamlessly, so the user experience needs to be the same and the core proposition needs to be the same. People get trusted content and when you go to our mobile site or our mobile application, or a tablet, or you go on to the IPTV service, you’re getting the same product, the same content. We might take the inherent capabilities of some of those platforms, such as the fact that your mobile knows who you are and what your location is, to deliver a more personalized service – but, fundamentally, you get exactly the same kind of product on each of those devices.
¤ The news app was the first BBC product for connected TVs – has successful is it?
I’ve been absolutely delighted with it, actually. With every first version of a product, you’re never quite sure what the audience response is going to be, no matter how much market research you do in advance. It’s not until people actually use it and you see the behaviour patterns . . . We’ve been very encouraged by the number of people who have downloaded it. It’s encouraged us to continue with our plans to roll out the service on other platforms.
