A clash of broadcasting worlds

Did you watch Felix Baumgartner's record breaking jump yesterday? It was amazing.

Watching live on the Red Bull branded wesite at www.redbullstratos.com, I thought we could be seeing a new era in live broadcasting. After all, if you own the content, then why get somebody else to broadcast it for you? Run your own station, for as long as you need it, on the web.

Why would Neil Armstrong's moon landing be broadcast on TV in an era of live streaming?

There is a very good reason.

Red Bull's stream (via YouTube) attracted an audience of eight million. That would be very impressive if it was a UK audience, but it isn't. It's a global audience.

Eight million globally is, frankly, a bit crap. It's a YouTube record, but that's not the point. ITV were showing an hour long Coronation Street special at the same time as Felix was hoping he'd packed his 'chute properly and that did 6.25m, just in the UK.

So why do you want a regular TV broadcaster for your content? Simple. Audience reach. It's the same reason advertisers want TV ads, even if they've truly bought into social media.

I'm assuming one of two things happened with Red Bull Stratos. Either Google bunged Red Bull some fairly serious cash for the exclusive rights to Live stream via YouTube, or regular broadcasters just weren't interested, because they couldn't be given a predictable prime-time slot when the jump would take place. "Sometime in the next week if the weather's ok" doesn't really work for an ITV scheduler.

In one (fabulous) event, we've got the best and worst of new and old media. Only old media could have got that footage in front of its true potential audience. But TV is too inflexible to make the scheduling work for an event as unpredictable as the Stratos project.

In the UK at least, it's a shame we didn't have a dedicated digital TV channel that could be activated on short notice and then trailed on a major network. Press the red button to watch a nutter jump from space. The technology is there and it worked really well during the olympics. For a moon landing type event (Mars landing?) in 2012, I'm betting that's what would happen.

Unfortunately, the broadcaster with that capability is the BBC. With Red Bull logos everywhere? Never going to happen.

We're not quite living in the future yet. If you missed the footage yesterday because you didn't have one eye on Twitter, then here's the Austrian with the big cahones in all his high altitude parachutey glory. Enjoy.

Social media as a source is a dangerous game for newspapers

Many commentators have described the conditions currently facing the UK newspaper market as a 'perfect storm'. The increasing share of advertising budgets taken by the web, rising print prices and a recession are combining to put pressure on printed news as never before.

Alan Rusbridger recently explained The Guardian's price rise to £1.20 in these terms,

"All newspapers are being buffeted by a number of forces, not least the digital revolution, which is competing for attention and sucking advertising, especially jobs advertising, out of print. If fewer people buy newspapers (and our bit of the market has shrunk 9% over the past six months) that's less revenue. If, because of a tough economic climate or changing technologies, fewer people advertise in print, that's less revenue still."

I'm not going to try to claim I have the answer to these problems. However a trend is emerging in the digital versions of our traditional news outlets, which I'm certain is not the answer.

I reviewed the excellent Flat Earth News a while ago and that book makes a fantastic case for the churnalistic echo chamber that our news outlets have become. If one paper reports a story, then all can report it as fact, referencing the first that ran it. If it's sourced from a wire service, it's gospel and need not be checked, even though wire services are under huge financial pressure themselves and so are cutting back on their own checking.

Traditional news outlets are trying to use their presence on the web to position themselves as a higher quality source of information and debate than social media. You'd expect more reliable information and a better standard of debate from The Guardian or the BBC, than you'd find on Twitter. It's a sensible strategy.

Unfortunately, cost cutting and a desire not to miss out on information that people can source from outlets like Twitter is also seeing their quality eroded.

At the moment, this is largely visible in news outlets' Live Blogs. Take this example from the BBC's football transfer deadline day coverage.

Transfer deadline day is very much silly season for rumours, but if I want pure speculation, there's plenty to be found on Twitter. If the BBC's only bringing me the same speculation I can find elsewhere, then what is its purpose?

An example on a more serious story appeared on The Guardian website yesterday in their coverage of the Dale Farm eviction case.

Several commentors on the article (inlcuding me) had argued that even though plenty of reporters were present at the site, we'd heard very little from local residents' on their opinions of the planned eviction. Plenty from lawyers, politicians, celebrities and the travellers who live on the site; almost nothing from their neighbours.

Eventually, the writers of the Live Blog cobbled together a few opinions from people commenting on the article who 'claim to be local to the site'. It was a weak solution to an element of the story that the reporters could see they needed to cover. Crucially, it's only the relatively low volume of comments on Wallpapering Fog that stops me from doing exactly the same thing here. If I hit any one of the multitude of current affairs forums and nicked a bit of content, I could do exactly the same thing here. For The Guardian to stand above social media, it needs to do more.

It's a small symptom of a growing problem. When our news outlets just serve commentary that they've sourced unchecked from social media, what is their purpose? I can visit social media directly and I can't easily check the claims made there either.

This sort of tactic will work for a while as organisations like The Guardian are able to live on their reputations, but gradually, those repuations are being eroded. Like a brand that becomes addicted to price discounting, they buy cheap sales now, at the expense of the future value of the company.

Our traditional news media need to cut costs and to adapt, but if they don't set themselves apart from social media by differentiating on quality then they'll have no future at all.

If online newspapers move to subscription

Then where does that leave bbc.co.uk?

Rupert Murdoch has announced today that he expects News International's online titles to be on a subscription model 'within a year'.

And the Guardian is considering making specialist areas of its website, such as MediaGuardian, subscription based.

Surely that leaves the BBC as the elephant in the room. BBC.co.uk is already the UK's 10th most visited website and the largest UK news site.


If other online news outlets move to subscription models and the BBC remains free, then it represents a huge market distortion. I'll be expecting fireworks from Murdoch when, as the UK newspaper market begins to charge for content, the BBC's online traffic starts to rise.

Nice graphic from the beeb

Be afraid! Don't go outside! You're all going to die of swine flu. Or possibly develop some flu-like symptoms and then get better.

Yes, this swine flu is potentially serious, but this graphic from the beeb is ridiculous.


Red for confirmed cases, orange for suspected. Nice. Yesterday's supected case in the UK came back negative, but apparently a Canadian woman in Manchester might have flu (or swine flu, we can't be sure) so colour the UK orange. Start looking for a hypochondriac in Russia who 'suspects' they have swine flu and you can colour in a really big bit of the map.

Really expect better.

Next step for the BBC iPlayer - Updated

I'm not the BBC's biggest fan, but have to admit to liking the iPlayer. I don't use it much though and that's only partly due to not being the BBC's biggest fan. It's mostly because I don't like watching TV on my PC. I haven't lived in student accommodation for years and so I like watching TV in my lounge.

The Beeb has just upgraded the iPlayer to higher definition, which is great.

It doesn't solve the problem of getting it off PCs and onto TVs though. Sony's Playstation 3 is a step in the right direction. It's got a web browser in it, that you can use to get to the iPlayer and then blow the video up to full screen on your big flat screen telly. Brilliant.

There are a couple of problems with the PS3 approach though. It's a bit fiddly (only a little bit) to start up a games console and then find the web browser to see what's available. It's also limited to people who have bought the console and are motivated to see if it's possible.

This has always been a problem for next generation media technologies. They're not seamless and so adoption is limited. Apple get it. Microsoft seem to sit there wondering why people get annoyed with a Vista Media Centre that technically does everything, but is a complete pain in the arse to use.

So what should the BBC do?

This article from December last year points the right way. Sounds to me like grand language for giving the iPlayer an API. In case you're more media than analyst, an API is a way for programmers to access something without going through the user menus. Twitter's got one, it's why there are so many great uses of its data drifting around already.

Here's hoping that the BBC don't try to control the iPlayer. Open it wide and make the content available. Come over all Web 2.0. Don't worry about making set top boxes - the box manufacturers will do that for you when they see they can sell loads with 'iPlayer Included' plastered on them. They'll do the interface programming for you too, so forget about making widgets or downloadable applications.

If we're lucky, and the BBC get this right, we're a year or so from having a Freeview box with iPlayer seamlessly integrated into the electronic programme guide. And a slightly more popular Beeb.


Edit 24/4/09:
This BBC press release on Project Canvas that was released in February has a lot more detail, but may suffer the same fate as Project Kangaroo.

There's an easy solution to this but it means the BBC giving up control of the medium. Build an open source API for the iPlayer. Let set top box manufacturers pull content from any provider of IPTV who chooses to use the API.

They'll all put the iPlayer at the top of the list anyway and the regulators can't possibly have any complaints because the BBC would be creating a mechanism that helps everybody (but especially themselves) deliver streaming video to TVs.

Just think - you buy a set top box, which is already set up to deliver iPlayer, the ITV Player and a few others and if you want to add Vimeo to the list then you can with a few clicks.
(Vimeo is going to do to Youtube what Facebook has done to Myspace by the way if Google don't get to work on Youtube sharpish.)

The importance of a theme tune

The F1 Grand Prix starts again this Sunday and it's moved back to the BBC.

Like a lot of people it seems, I used to watch the F1 pretty regularly, up to sometime when Schumacher was dominating and then began to lose interest.

This isn't about F1 as a spectacle though, it's about the BBC's theme music - a bass line that for a generation of fans is the Grand Prix. In their trailers, the beeb leave it till late to give a little hint of the tune.



From the minute the change back from ITV was announced, there were three themes of conversation among fans. Thank God James Allen's gone, no adverts and will they bring back The Chain? Apart from a well publicised mishap in San Marino (and James Allen) I thought ITV's Grand Prix coverage was actually pretty good. There's plenty of space in an hour's racing to slot in an ad break or two. The Jamiroquai theme music was totally forgettable though.

The link to the BBC theme is so strong, I'd have been tempted to lead with music as a creative idea for the trailer, rather than 'The World's Greatest Car Chase', but then I'm 31 and supose it has to appeal to viewers who didn't grow up watching Nigel Mansell and listening to Murray Walker.

Still, when people are imagining their own opening credits on youtube, you've got to be onto something. For me, this isn't the BBC's brand that fans are excited about. It's the brand that the BBC created for F1 over many years and all the associations with past champions that come with it.



If you are one of that older generation, you'll probably enjoy this.