Social Media FORUM

Next Generation Media - A Look at the British Media Landscape and its Forerunner

Ian Forrester, Senior Backstage Producer, BBC

2008-02-12: 09:30 - 10:00

1) Mr Forrester - as Senior Backstage Producer of BBC you have been invited to the upcoming Social Media FORUM on February 12th in Hamburg to talk about the "Next Generation Media" - especially from a British and BBC-orientated perspective. With which three keywords can you characterize your talk?

Social, Participation, Open

2) Talking about the British media landscape what are the main challenges for the BBC in this market?

The BBC is well known in the UK market, a large percent of people go our news and homepages but this won't always be the case. We use to think our competition in this area was Channel4, ITV, Sky, Guardian. But actually our competition is coming from Google, Yahoo, MSN, Facebook, etc. Google is the 4th most used news outlet, but Google just simply syndicates other news outlets content and adds extra value through the way its presentated to the user. The internet is global and its a big mistake to just think about your geographical market.

3) Regarding this challenges what is the vision of BBC? How is the understanding about the relationship between the BBC and its community?

The BBC has always had a tight bond with its audience. The BBC exists because of the British public funding the BBC, the public feel a certain amount of ownership of the BBC and its content. So projects like the open archive, radio labs, bbc blogs, backstage are examples of us engaging with the public directly and delivering parts of the vision.

The challenge is to keep up our end of the bargain by innovating and delivering on the vision for the public which exceeds there expectations without distorting the commercial market. Its a tight rope to walk but I think with the release of the streaming iplayer your seeing proof that we really do listen to the public. Once the API is available, we can not wait to see where our content ends up.

4) Does the BBC has a defined community strategy? If yes - what is the idea of the strategy? If not - why not?

The BBC does have a strategy around community and participation. It started by us looking at our different platforms and identifying what unique characteristics they have. Before this, our strategy across platforms was somewhat inconsistent and this meant we didn't give our different communities what they wanted or expected. The multiplatform support became a important part of the BBC 2.0 strategy which essentially focused on the BBC breaking down its walls and becoming more web like. Being more web like meant stepping back and realising that were not the centre of our audiences world. Being web like also means our audience are co-creators and most of the time know more about the subject that ourselves. These are just some of the principles which have made there way into the BBC 2.0 strategy.

5) You are part of the BBC Backstage - a kind of technical and conceptional think tank for the BBC. What is the mission of this think tank and where do the ideas of this think tank come from?

Actually I run BBC Backstage a developer/designer network with a huge difference. Your partly right about the conceptional think tank, backstage encourages the public to actual build there ideas, not just talk about them. One of the key things which enables this to happen is the Backstage licence which enables anyone to use BBC data and feeds under a creative commons like non-commercial attribution licence. The next key is the conversations which exists on backstage and on the rest of the net. We participate in the conversations and sometimes steer them towards certain people in internally and externally. This means ideas and prototypes can be taken forward and maybe end up as a full supported BBC service. BBC Backstage is grassroots innovation and participation.