3 Years of BBC Taster

Published: 1 February 2018

Oliver Spall
Senior Product Manager

This past weekend marked BBC Taster’s third birthday. How time has flown. We’ve been busy.

Just looking at what’s appeared on Taster in the past few years is pretty exciting.

In three years we’ve worked with brilliant people from rappers and YouTubers to natural scientists, and historians. We’ve put them in VR, created interactive experiences around them, and also helped showcase entirely new ways to experience some of the most well known brands and talent at the BBC.

We also opened up our platform for organisations to showcase their innovative projects. In turn, their amazing work has helped open up new tech to new audiences around the world.

What did we learn?

First. We proved that Taster isn’t just a shop window. It’s a set of tools that let people develop projects and learn from them.

Second. We are stronger, and develop more challenging projects as an enabling service. Working in partnership with teams across the BBC, and beyond, has shown to be a successful strategy this year in generating top class projects, and enabling teams to take risks across the BBC.

Third. Data matters. It is essential to test out research and prototypes with your audiences, and learn from their feedback. Some of the big bets that BBC R&D has on the future have taken inspiration from Taster feedback and it’s only because of trialling in a live environment that we have the knowledge to keep going.

Finally, we think that Taster offers the tools, the audience and the insight to help the BBC and organisations to build the next big thing by experimenting, and learning about how to tell stories differently.

What does that look like in numbers, then?

In the three years since launch, that’s 276 pilots that have come through the Taster product. Just in the past year we published 65 pilots, enabling 24 teams inside the BBC and with selected partners to develop experimental content for our audiences across the globe.

14 Million

That’s a nice Euromillions jackpot. It’s a touch more than the population of greater London. It’s also the number of people who visited Taster to date.

We salute you for your curiosity.

179,000

That’s more than the population of Peterborough, and a shade off the population of Middlesbrough.

Most importantly though, 179,000 is the number of ratings we have received for pilots to date. That’s almost 7 ratings an hour, every hour.

We owe a big thank you to those who contributed their opinion on Taster pilots. It’s this feedback that helps teams learn about what you like and don’t like and understand what to make next.

The number of chromosomes a human has, and a slang greeting in Japanese (yon roku, if you want to impress some Japanese friends).

But the important number 46 is the number of teams who have used Taster to get their projects out there. That ranges from BBC Comedy to News and Research and Development, plus a range of our industry and cultural partners.

Without these great minds Taster wouldn’t exist.

So what’s happened because of that?

We rebuilt our insights offering to be more scalable and effective for pilot teams to learn the maximum they can from their pilots.

We redesigned our feedback tools to integrate better with most BBC products, and pretty much any interface that’s in current use. We also made it more rewarding to rate and feedback on a pilot, making the act of feeding back more intuitive. You can see this in use here, in Connected Studio’s Mars 2020.

Finally, we’ve been rebuilding aspects of our site as well, to offer more flexible and adaptable experiences for the multiple kinds of content we offer. Check out our brand new pages now on this week’s top pilot:

None of this would be possible though without you curious folks trying out and feeding back on projects.

It’s really exciting to see Taster helping people change, and adopt new ways of doing things.

It’s hard to pick highlights, but this small list from 2017 wouldn’t be a bad start to show how much teams across the BBC are defining and discovering what the BBC might make in the future.

Immersive experiences: This year has been full of ground breaking experiments in live, interactive and branching narrative VR and 360 video, which has gone on to make the case for the emergence of BBC Reality Labs and VR Hub. Just a handful to highlight would be the launch of the Taster VR app, which gave way to exciting projects that offer interactive stories about lions, school runs and the world land speed record. Also the unmissable series of Doctor Who experiments which gave people the keys to the T.A.R.D.I.S, as well as extra 3D audio scares in spooky episode Knock Knock. Technology also came along in leaps and bounds and BBC R&D’s experiments in interactive 360 video at Edinburgh Festival has pushed the boundaries of what can be done with the emerging WebVR standard. Finally we also helped the BBC’s Media Player team trial an early version of their 360 player, which has directly influenced their design choices for that product. It’s great to see how Taster data is helping to shape the next wave of experiments in these spaces.

Telling stories with objects: Back in January 2017 the Cook Along Kitchen Experience premiered an entirely new way of making content, and cake, from BBC R&D. This offered ground breaking personalised content delivered as ‘objects’ as opposed to standard video files. September saw another world first, with an object-based radio drama from BBC R&D called The Mermaid’s Tears. The audience data from both of these pilots have gone on to directly influence how BBC R&D develops its object-based media offering.Talking about our time in Edinburgh, we were really excited to trial the first live public broadcast using BBC R&D’s SOMA application and IP Studio. This trial generated valuable feedback data from audiences experiencing live video broadcast of shows that had never been broadcast using video before, as well as essential experience for production teams using this brand new tech.

Voice and conversation: Finally, towards the end of the year, we began to push the BBC’s focus on voice and conversational interfaces. We were lucky to work with teams developing a series of projects that tested messenger bots with characters from Murder in Successville, and Voice interfaces for Amazon Echo with BBC R&D’s Alexa Skill The Inspection Chamber. The technology underpinning this pilot is now being used to inform some of the tooling the BBC develops around conversational interfaces.

If you’re still hungry for more, all you need to do is go to Taster.

So, what’s next?

We’re excited about developing more adventures in object based, IP driven and immersive content. Working closely with teams across BBC R&D, 2018 has much in store for an entirely new way of making content.

We’re also setting ourselves up to develop our services for teams outside of the BBC to use our products, and experiment more easily in their organisations and with their audiences.

Data is the focus for the first part of 2018, and we have been working hard to continue to evolve our ability to help teams understand people’s feedback easily and make decisions about what content to make next.

Most importantly, we see the way that the amazing people from around the world who support pilots on Taster can share their feedback and thoughts becoming deeper, more rewarding and collaborative over 2018.

There are still a few surprises we’ve got up our sleeves before the next birthday, but we’ll sign off for the moment, open a few presents and leave it up to you to Try, Rate and Share as many pilots as you like.

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Oliver Spall

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