Save 6Music. At the expense of what?

If anyone has ever scrolled all the way down the side of this blog to the LastFM widget, they would probably guess that I listen to 6Music as well. It's basically where they let all the most opinionated and passionate music fans on the BBC payroll (Steve Lamacq, Marc Riley, Lauren Laverne, Jarvis Cocker, etc) do what they want, in return for doing what the BBC wants the rest of the time. And as has been widely reported, and widely criticised, the BBC are closing it as part of a radical programme of cuts.

To me this raises are few interesting questions. Firstly, the fact that popular and cross party political opinion leaves the BBC no choice but to make cuts to defend its licence fee. Before the recession an ambitious BBC could defend its increasing commercialisation of brands like Top Gear and CBeebies (which owe their popularity to having initially been licence-fee funded) by having to compete with ad-funded competition. Since ad-funded competition has all but disappeared in a perfect storm of disappearing ad revenues and pension deficit disasters (not to mention a distinct lack of leadership/recruitment crisis at critical moments from the main terrestrial competition), this argument has vanished, and probably won't return.

So the BBC is left with a healthy licence fee income while ITV and C4 slash programming budgets and staff. As the newspaper industry goes to town on stories of rampant expenditure on salaries (management as well as Wossy) and Broadcasting House refurbishment, defending the BBC's sole use of licence fee income becomes impossible without cuts of some kind.

On one hand, 6Music is exactly what the BBC should be producing - things that appeal to niche audiences where there is no commercial alternative. While the remit of a licence fee funded media company has to cover the whole country, there is no excuse in the 21st century for thinking that this has to be in one place. The BBC shouldn't need to care about the ratings of individual programmes, simply about their cumulative reach across the whole country every month. In lots of little, personally relevant chunks.

Looking at it from that perspective, the cost saving opportunities become more obvious. ITV makes better soaps that the BBC (or it makes, Corrie, which is better than Eastenders). It also makes better Saturday night peak - Pop Idol vs Celebrity Come Dancing. So those are my opinions, but they are backed by viewing figures most weeks. Anyway, there are more popular alternatives commercially available. Why not cut the expensive stuff that commercial broadcasters do better, and concentrate on the niches.

On the other hand, it is quite possible that there would be commercial alternatives to the niche personal stuff that the BBC makes, if only they didn't make it. ITV still has a business model when BBC1 exists, as does News Int to compete with bbc.co.uk (although Murdoch doesn't seem to agree). Perhaps the commercially funded 6Music couldn't exist as it could never escape the shadow of Radio 1. All 6Music really is is an aggregation of the music tastes and opinions of some well respected music industry professionals, backed by the marketing support of Radio 1. Intriguingly, the barriers to those individuals continuing to curate their opinions and tastes for an hour a week are pretty small: Ricky Gervais pretty much wrote the manual on this in podcasting terms, but there are all sorts of ways of dicing this up through iTunes, LastFM, and hundreds of other routes. The technology and distribution costs are tiny. The streaming rights are all in place on Spotify. LastFM, We7, etc. So do the people involved in 6Music think it is worth saving?

Personally I'm signing all the petitions to #Save6Music. Not because I like it - I do, but that's irrelevant. We should save it because it represents what the BBC should do far better than Eastenders or anything on Saturday night peak BBC1. But if it isn't saved by the BBC then I hope that the curators who made it what it is can prove that it is commercially viable.

The best content in the world

(Heron Island, AU - photo credit)
A while back I wrote a few bits about some of the ways that technology is going to make people's lives simpler: mostly concentrating on improving the bits of people's lives that revolve around people, information and entertainment (ie the good bit). The great thing that technology does is make connections with all these things much easier and faster. The problem for the traditional providers of information and entertainment is that technology allows people to miss out all the annoying ads that interupt what they are looking for. As technology gets smarter, this might well move from 'ability to avoid' to 'preset to ignore'. If the amount of available and personalised content exceeds your attention span, but your devices are able to filter it based on learnt preferences, then an advertisement has to be better than a programme (to use a TV analogy) before your devices will even recommend it. (BTW your devices WILL know more about what you want to watch than you will ever need to).

This causes a problem for brands, who have tended towards interuption of content to gain attention. The idea of branded content (which to me means informational or entertainment content that is at least as good as the best of non-branded content) has seemed like a holy grail to the media agency business, and one which has largely been diluted by ad-funded OFCOM regulated quasi-sponsorships on TV, or tactical product placement exercises online. Ads that are better then programmes are still either unrealistic or regulated out of existance (in the UK anyway).

So what has changed?
If you've seen much news in the last few months you'll know that a British bloke has blagged a job as the caretaker of an island on the Great Barrier Reef in Queensland. And that there was a recruitment campaign the first day back to work in January, then 35,000 entries uploaded, then a swim/blog/lounge-off for the shortlist in Queensland. As well as a some £50m worth of PR for the Queensland Tourist Board who commissioned the campaign and a Cannes Grand Prix for CumminsNitro who created it. Not to mention 6 months on an island for Ben Southall who won.

And more importantly for the purposes of this post, the BBC have commissioned an hour of documentary about the selection process (which cleverly took place on some of the most beautiful islands that the tourist board looks after). This airs on Thursday at 9pm on BBC2 - primetime BBC real estate. This isn't ad-funded programming, this is ad-inspired programming - a campaign so good it inspires commissioning editors to join in, producing content that is all about marketing the destination (the whole point of the campaign).

(Slight tangent - I was going to put a link in this post to Marcus Brown's Content Manifesto, because it takes the future of agencies and tourist board marketing to the logical creative extreme, and so seemed relevant. But Marcus has turned the site into a book so I can't.)

This Kangaroo has ceased to be....

(Photo Credit - Flickr user Thomas Rosenzweig)
Right, I'm going to keep this [relatively] short, as I was looking forward to having the BBC's back catalogue on tap as much as the next comedy addict. What's that? Have I heard of YouTube. Oh!

So the Competitions Commission have pulled the plug on Project Kangaroo. The idea of the 3 main broadcast content providers in the UK all distributing through the same portal whilst selling ads separately was referred to in the report as something that 'has to be stopped'. And you can see the Commission's point. After all, this is supposed to be the future of TV, not just exactly the same model as we have now. I can't see the difference between a TV screen that's been showing content from three UK-based content providers since 1982, and a computer screen doing the same. The only winners are the walled gardens that the ISPs would love to lock us into. Something like Boxee is great, but only for the few people who know that they want this type of app and go out and look for it. The sort of marketing that BBC, ITV and C4 can throw at a new technology between them would put UK internet usageitself onto a different level.

Where do they go to from here? Well the market for their content isn't going anywhere. It's just the portal that they aren't allowed to collaborate on. I'd expect to see ITV.com, 4OD and iPlayer scaled up quickly, but this isn't a replacement. It was the robust aggregation platform that would have been the success of of Kangaroo - everything all in one place. If the broadcasters were brave, they would free the content: instream ad units, distributable anywhere. Don't worry too much about the actual viewing platform. Sound familiar? Because it's where we're all going to be viewing our archive UK content now. Until Hulu launches, and BBC, ITV and C4 sell them the content rights. So that 18 months of legal review has got us where exactly? The same result, but US owned.

Someone said it had been snowing....

Photo Credit
So lots of people in central London couldn't get to work yesterday. And lots of other people on the mainland and in North America understandably laughed at us for getting in such a fuss over 6 inches of snow (incidentally, is snow the only thing other than TV screens still measured in inches? I don't understand imperial measures on principle, but have spent the last couple of days converting centimetres BACK into inches, like it's the 1950s).

And once we'd finished our 'every five years sledging expedition', we turned the day into genuine English community spirit. Lots of weather to talk about, a proper reason to whinge about public transport, but an overwhelming sense of being sent home from school. London certainly turned into a bunch of kids for the day. And what means now is sharing experiences with as many people as possible. The BBC had the largest ever response to an appeal for photos, video, stories, etc. Much of the BBC news consisted of camera phone video: this was news affecting everyone and documented by everyone.

But it was also the day that Twitter showed its public service credentials.
Not for everyone, but anyone using it was at a distinct advantage. By 8am the overground rail companies' information boards had frozen up, the TFL website was buckling under the weight of traffic, but anyone following @uktrains knew exactly what their chances of getting anywhere were (slim to none). The app pulls feeds from the BBC, shortens them in Yahoo Pipes to 140 characters or less, and publishes them through Twitterfeed. More details here

We also joined in at crowdsourcing the weather forecast. From Sunday afternoon's excited but disorganised 'Its snowing in [wherever]' tweets, we had moved by early Monday morning to a semi official hashtag #uksnow, and a location based weight of snow system, relying on tweets including the hashtag, a postcode, and a snow intensity out of ten (eg. '#uksnow SE24 7/10'). This fed Ben Marsh's fantastic #uksnow mashup, showing live Twitter sourced weatherTo be fair this is more of a map of where it is snowing AND people use Twitter, rather than simply of where it is snowing. But you get the picture.

To me the really big and important mash-up will be when the BBC start broadcasting events like this using Twitter. We saw it a couple of weeks ago when Janis Krums' photo of US Airways Flight 1549 floating in the Hudson River made front pages around the world, but that was a single big event where he happened to be closer than the news crews. We also saw it pre-planned with CNN's Facebook Connect link up for the US presidential inauguration. Here, in a random weather event affecting half the country, the real personal content was there for all to see and mashup, and there was a major broadcaster desperately seeking real personal content. The BBC's coverage has been all the better for leading with non-professional footage, but next national story there need to be more integration.

Social TV - a BBC Vision perspective

Isn't it great when you find that what you want to write has already been written by someone far more knowledgeable about a subject. I've written about how I think TV might develop using Boxee, Facebook Connect, Apple TV, XBox 360, etc, in a networked technological future, and wanted to find out a bit more (for a 'What to look out for in 2009' sort of post that may or may not happen this month). But fortunately Roo Reynolds, Portfolio Executive for Social Media at BBC Vision, has already written this - well worth checking out here

How to break a Blackberry

I seem to be writing about Stephen Fry a lot at the moment. Partly because I'm a big fan who could recite Blackadder off by heart when I was a kid, but I suspect mostly because he is always front of mind through his brilliant use of Twitter (not so much marketing his own work as marketing Twitter to the UK). Anyway, as I mentioned below, he is a bit of an Apple fan, and and as Guardian Dork Talk readers know, one of the country's leading authorities on mobiles, smart phones and the like.

Anyway, this is all relevant because of a couple of tweets he wrote last week.

"Been playing with the BB Storm. Shockingly bad. I mean embarrassingly awful. Such a disappointment. Rushed out unfinished. What a pity."

"Yes, I blame n'works more than RIM. Problems are terrible lag: inaccurate t'screen, awful, slow and fiddly text input. I SO wanted to like it."

"Plus the GPS maps won't work - issue with BIS connections. I see from forums postings this is widespread in the UK. iPhone killer? Ha!"

You'd expect that the sort of people who make up Stephen's 24,000 followers on Twitter would include lots of other people who grew up being captivated by his wit. They might very well also be the sort of people who might already have Blackberries, and be thinking around Xmas time about whether to upgrade the iPhone or try this potential iPhone killer. I certainly passed the link on to a couple of people who asked my opinion. And given that Stephen has worked all through his career at the BBC, you might expect one or two journalists might interested in this opinion. And sure enough, Rory Cellan-Jones picked this up over the weekend for the BBC's tech blog dotlife, and questioned whether Stephen Fry could kill a Blackberry?

Although it is a bit scary to put that sort of power in the hands of an Apple fan, you have got to question what RIM/Vodafone (not sure whose responsibility it would be) are doing in not involving someone with Stephen's authority in their field. It isn't difficult to map networks and see where the authority lies (although you'd hope they might know...)

His comments above would be valuable feedback if they were gathered BY Vodafone before the product launched. They could be addressed, and an authoritative tech blogger would feel that his experience had contributed to any success the product had. As it is, the gadget websites that probably formed the core PR campaign have got a much better story - a celebrity who hates the product. At this point I should link to a relevant gadget website, but I'm not going to do that. You see the media agency are just as culpable as the PR agency for not being in touch with what's going on. Check the Blackberry Storm contextually targeted ads are all over this T3 screenshot

It shouldn't be this difficult guys.....

If the BBC took advertising....

Found this link as a display ad on iMedia.


This is what a BBC media pack looks like, which almost seems like a glimpse into a parallel world.....

Also love the concept that of the BBC marketing itself as influencing the influencers. I suppose it shows the power of the BBC brand in the UK that I find this all so utterly incongruous.

White Space and Super WiFi

Somewhere hidden away beneath the election fallout last week came the news from the US that white space, the unused frequency between TV stations' analogue transmissions, is going to be freed up for use by the communications industry. The FCC ruling came after heavy lobbying from Google, who stand to benefit most from the new bandwidth as TV switches over to digital.

The main benefit for people away from their home internet connection appears to be turbocharged Wifi, broadcasting over far wider ranges and at much higher speeds than is currently possible. Obviously more time spent online means more revenue for Google, so a good short term gain for them.... The real potential for immediate step change though is what happens if these bandwidths could be used for voice calling. As Jeff Jarvis comments in the NY Post

When we can get fast bandwidth on portable devices, we can use those gadgets to do anything from making phone calls to browsing the Web.

In other words, kiss those old phones and two-year contracts goodbye and turn to new, open devices that run software from - you guessed it - Google.

Suddenly the open platform Android looks like a the consumer champion when compared to those walled garden mobile networks, not to mention the iPhone. All radical stuff, and in the run up to the analogue switch-off over here, something that is equally applicable in the UK...

Or is it? After all, public service broadcasting is a far bigger beast in the UK than the US. Surely free national turbo wifi in place of the BBC's analogue bandwidth would remove large amounts of criticism over the licence fee (especially if it was subsidised by a partnership with Google). Alternatively, with C4 negotiating for licence fee funding to maintain its public sector remit, and basing the case on the fact that they are losing valuable analogue bandwidth when they switch to digital, is there a rationale for OFCOM allowing them to keep their current bandwidth after switchover, and auction it off on the open market?