The Second Digital Wave: BBC News Online, Embedded Video and the iPlayer

Editors: Burns, M. and Brügger, N.

Pages: 17-30

Publisher: Peter Lang

Place of Publication: New York

ISBN: 978-1-4331-1175-4

Abstract:

‘Yes, we have one of the best websites in the world but it’s rooted in the first digital wave’, proclaimed the BBC Director General, Mark Thompson, during his Royal Television Society Fleming Memorial Lecture in 2006. Traditional media had coped quite well, in his view, with the challenges posed by this first wave by launching new (digital) linear channels, text-based websites, and some experimentation with mobile devices. He also maintained that the BBC had played a significant part in the success of this first wave, through pioneering high quality on the web, and playing a leading role in digital broadcast services and infrastructure. ‘Anyone who thinks that that’s the size of it - and there’s plenty of them across British broadcasting – has got a big shock coming’, Thompson warned. Rapid developments in technology and audience adaptation were according to him heralding ‘a distinct second digital wave’ with dramatic consequences.

'I believe that this second digital wave will turn out to be far more disruptive than the first, that it will be fundamentally disruptive, and that the foundations on which much of traditional media is built may be swept away entirely' (Thompson, 2006).

In order to prepare the BBC’s websites for the second digital wave, Thompson declared that the Corporation needed ‘to re-invent it, fill it with dynamic audio-visual content, personalise it, open it up to user-generated content’ (Thompson, 2006). Moreover, the relationship with the audiences also needed renewing – ‘they won’t just be audiences anymore, but participants and partners’ (Thompson, 2006).

The emphasis on ‘dynamic audio-visual’ content is fitting with the BBC’s traditional role as a public service broadcaster. However, reflecting the audio-visual nature of the Corporation’s traditional output is not something entirely new as might be implied by Thompson’s assertion that websites of the first digital wave were text-based. This emphasis on text is also reflected in discussions surrounding the history of online public service broadcasting, which gives very little attention to online video. Such a mindset is problematic for two reasons. Firstly, it tends to neglect the rich history of online video during the first digital wave, and secondly, as indicated by Thompson above, the future of online public service broadcasting may yet turn out to be audio-visual. In taking a historical approach, this chapter will therefore focus on some of the defining moments in BBC’s use of online video through both the first and second digital waves (for discussions on other aspects, see Thorsen et al., 2009, Thorsen, 2010, Allan and Thorsen, 2010).

Source: Manual

Preferred by: Einar Thorsen