Julian Clover on the propeller heads that have created a vital organ of the new BBC.
You can’t help but thinking that when the plans were laid to sell off what were then BBC Broadcast and BBC Technology into what is now Red Bee Media and Siemens that Whitehall mandarins missed a trick. Far from retrenching into an organisation solely concerned with the production of television programmes, or even turning itself into a publisher along the lines of Channel 4, the BBC has continued to innovate.
There is still the Research and Development team at Kingswood Warren who drafted many of the specs for the Freesat platform, and then there is the Future Media team that is responsible for the management of the iPlayer, the catch up TV service that has single-handedly taken broadband TV into the mainstream.
This week barely six months after its commercial launch – if indeed the BBC is allowed to call it commercial – the iPlayer launched a new beta service that will add new functionality following research with three sets of focus groups.
Although initially touted as a download service it remains the case that for every download there are ten streams of the BBC content on the site that covers around half of the corporation’s broadcast output.
In fairness to the private sector companies that have contributed to the iPlayer it has not been entirely the BBC’s own work, though it is absolutely clear that the direction has been, and belated announcements have a distinct after the Lord Mayor’s show feel about them. It’s hardly surprising everyone wants to get in on the act – the iPlayer is the most impressive online TV offering anywhere.
Erik Huggers, the former Microsoft executive and group controller of Future Media and Technology, attributes the success within the department to a “small group of fantastic propeller heads that can get it done”. The multinational team includes staff members drawn from Microsoft, Joost and Kazaa.
Huggers has been tipped as a possible successor Ashley Highfield, the BBC’s current director of Future Media, who will leave later this year to join Kangaroo, the commercial venture established by the terrestrial networks to market their content once the open window on the iPlayer and its equivalents has been closed. There is already a halfway house, given the availability of content on iTunes, just a few days after its appearance on the main terrestrial networks.
As the iPlayer moves further into the mainstream then it will become an increasingly integral part of broadband life, fuelling demand for bandwidth, and giving ISPs a reason to upsell their customers to the next tier. The cries of foul have died down since the Epiphany when the ISPs effectively accused the BBC of encouraging people to use the product they had paid for.
Every site on the web puts a certain amount of pressure on an ISPs network, and there is no reason why the BBC should be singled out, even if it has created itself a new transmission network. After all, it was made to sell the last one.
