I am Head of Connected Studio and BBC R&D’s North lab in Salford.
I am also the Future Media Lead for BBC Taster and I am happy to say we successfully launched a first version on Monday.
This post is just an introduction to the concept of Taster and some of the thinking behind the approaches we are taking with it. To find out more about some of the specific editorial background of the pilots within Taster have a read of my editorial partner Will Saunders blog post.
I am really pleased to say that Taster has had a fantastic first week – testament to the efforts of the @bbctaster team and our partners across BBC. The first tranche of pilots surfaced in Taster on Monday morning and in our first 72 hours of a ‘planned soft launch’ we had over 180,000 unique visits to the site and over 4,500 Twitter followers join us. We are very pleased with the positive reaction from the users and the press and are already learning a lot for the BBC.
It’s early days but the reaction of those using BBC Taster and the pilots has been amazing with a whole range of users (not just those who love new tech) coming to try a number of the pilots. Fans of Run The Jewels have been coming and trying the interactive gig experience but also trying Your Story.
Why Taster?
Why is BBC Taster a new approach to open innovation at the BBC?
Innovation is a broad term that means different things to different people - for me and my team it means supporting ‘significant positive change” – a good definition from Scott Berkun’s work in this area and I believe that BBC Taster can be the start of a significant positive change for the BBC and our audiences.
BBC Taster is significant for BBC in number of ways:
Firstly, we are sharing early stage/work in progress/concepts or novel ideas – usually these are kept under wraps until they are perfect.
Secondly, we are acknowledging that not everything will work, some things might break (and have done so already) nor is everything complete or perfect. This is potentially hard for an organisation that prides itself on always being highest quality but by being agile what we gain this is a chance to learn quicker about what won’t work - saving money and improving final proposition.
Finally, we are inviting the audience in helping us to prioritise by trying, rating and sharing these pilots. This feedback is hugely valuable in helping us develop concepts further, but we aren’t asking audiences to make the final decisions on what gets turned into official BBC content or services. We still have our expertise in this but they can play an important role in helping us see breakthrough hits and avoiding the potential hype of new technologies.
Simply, this means we can learn as we go, find out what doesn’t work and hopefully find new ways of using the internet to deliver great content experiences – via new types of interactivity, new talent, new uses of archives and social, etc.
A smart person recently commented that the key question for media being online is no longer just “what can I create?” but also “why will the audience care about it?”
What is BBC Taster?
BBC Taster has three simple parts to its role as the Platform:
1. It’s the website that acts as an index to all the new pilots from across the whole BBC. The site is not designed around genres or types of pilot or the teams that built them but is based on our own experiment with style and tone focused on the user. For example the content discovery is based on “Try Something…” (about me/epic/fun).The pilots themselves are all time limited so they are not there forever (typically 3months maximum).
2. Over next few months you will then see the label of BBC Taster appear across rest of BBC Online and on other partner sites to identify those projects. The established BBC products are experimenting within their core area.
3. The third key element to Taster is the ability and desire for the audience to Try, Rate and Share each of the pilots – telling us what they do/don’t like. This enables us to really begin to learn from the audiences’ interactions what is required to turn the idea into reality .
The launch pilots are purposefully diverse and I’m pleased come from most corners of the BBC. We have only really scratched the surface of the ambitions of BBC and its partners. For example you can see just what can happen online to storytelling and documentaries with the exciting launch earlier today of Story of Now.
Finally, in building these pilots we have been able to work with some fantastic creative and technical expertise.
On the technical side, we have contributions from internal colleagues in Research & Development (e.g. BBC Shuffle and World Service Archive and via the folks in @BBCNewslabs (BBC Voicehack).
Externally we have been able to work with Touchcast and Interlude who focus on new forms of interactive video.
Specifically in my role as Head of Connected Studio I am particularly proud to get to see a number of our pilots reach audiences.
These are:
- Your story (BBC Northern Ireland and NixonMcInnes)
- R1OT (Radio 1 and Kite)
- Run the Jewels (BBC Arts and 100 Shapes)
- WeatherBot (BBC Weather and Nixon
McInnes – again). - Who’s in today (BBC Future Media and Complete Control)
There is a lot more going on that will be rolling out over the next few months. Please keep checking this blog as others in the Taster team will post more about each pilot and the juicy engineering and UX developments.
As a final thought, we want to be open in our workings with Taster and we genuinely believe that in this increasingly connected world it’s the right approach for us.
For now, I’m really keen to hear your comments, questions and opinions on what we should/shouldn’t be looking at that is relevant to audiences online.
BBC Taster home page
