BBC Backstage

We're all finally back from spinning around the world, and have lots to share and discuss. But till then here's an exclusive video interview with Tim O'Reilly. The interview was lined up by Chris Vallance from the BBC's 5 live Pods and Blogs programme, but backstage was able to record the video while Chris recorded the audio.

Enjoy...

Hi backstagers,

Although I've been a fan of backstage and worked on quite a few products seen here I've never posted before so I thought I'd better introduce myself. I work for the BBC, specifically looking after the digital futures of Radio 1, 1Xtra and Teens. I know it's not normal to post about BBC jobs going here but there are some specific tech roles I thought the backstage community might be interested in.

Basically, the BBC, like other broadcasters, knows it's got loads to do if it wants to continue to engage young audiences. This is where Project T (working title only!) comes in. Project T aims to bring together existing BBC content and make some new multi-platform material for 12-17 year olds.

To help us develop new sites and services for teenagers we're building a small, independent and agile digital lab operating with start-up mentality and capable of iterating quickly. We're currently recruiting software engineers, client side developers, designers, writers and producers.

Based in W1, we see the team working as a close unit with loosely defined roles. We want software engineers that want to write both sort of scripts and CSDs who fancy shooting film and producing!

If you're interested in the future of the web, young audiences and want to get stuff live fast check out this rather embarrassing BBC jobs link http://www.bbc.co.uk/jobs/projectbbct/.

Dan

As many of you may have already heard through the geek grape vine (GGV 2.0) ;-) The BBC and Yahoo! are planning to get together to hold 48 hours of hacking madness this summer.

Over the weekend of June 16th and 17th we plan to see over 400 developers and designers from all over Europe heading to Alexandra Palace in London to hack the hell out of our APIs and various feeds and systems. Plenty of help will be on hand if you're new to the scene, or if you just want to push the envelope with your ideas and prototypes.

We plan to finish the event with a huge concert (band is top secret - more details via GGV I'm sure) and party open to over 1000 people we hope.

The formal announcement and sign up will go live soon - so block the dates out of your diary and get those laptops charging.

And we're finally back from the University tour. We will have a full report of what happened (in reality and in second life) but till then we have a whole bunch of lovely pictures and our slideshow for everyone to download and view.

Why New Media is Dead

Continue reading "Back from the Backstage University tour" »

Michael Arrington finally responded to the comments he made at the Future of Webapps conference last month.

I sometimes say regretful things when speaking off the cuff at conferences. Last month at The Future of Web Apps conference in London I (jokingly) called for the dissolution of the BBC because some of their online ventures are, in my opinion, stifling private sector startup initiatives in the UK and Europe. As a publicly funded entity with near limitless financial resources, I think the BBC needs to be careful about what businesses they dip their toes into. I mentioned a new BBC virtual world product as an example.

Did I mean it literally? No. The BBC sends us far too much traffic for me to want it to dissolve (and I think it’s a brilliant, well run company as well). But the whole thing was caught on video and, as you can imagine, I was roundly (and I believe properly) criticized (although see this comment). At best this is none of my business, although I lived in the UK for many years and well remember the dreaded BBC television tax.

Newcastle
Monday evening we're at "the other bar" in Newcastle for a social event.. Tuesday were at Newcastle University during the day, and a few of us might go out for a meal afterwards. On Wednesday were at Northumbria University during the day.

Kent
Thursday afternoon/early evening we're going to be at Ravensbourne college. I'm sure some of us will end up at the well loved La Pasta in Bromley at some point afterwards.

Hull
Friday were up in Hull University but the Scarborough Campus. We're talking after lunch and we're trying to arrange something for Friday night.

Hope to see a lot of you guys next week. If we have missed your area, don't worry. The Backstage Tour starts again in September.

Backstage kicked off its University tour yesterday at Manchester Metropolitan on why new media was dead. We had quiet a diverse selection of students attend and ended up using all the time allocated, so didn't get a lot of questions afterwards. That or the students were not expecting such a brain dump of information. To make up for the brain dump, Backstage Schwag went down very well.

Dr Mark Stubbs from MMU said,

Good choice of stimulating material delivered with real passion - for what more could students ask!

Shortly afterwards, the Backstage bandwagon rolled into the MDDA for the Geekup event (Dave Verwer filmed the whole Geekup event.). After halving the talk down for a more savvy audience and more Schwag, it was off to the local bar to discuss some of the points. The night was enjoyed by all who were involved.

Roll on,
Newcastle next Monday
Northumbria on Wednesday
Ravensbourne on Thursday
and finally Hull and Scarborough

Tristan Ferne who leads the R&D team for Audio and Music interactive at BBC towers has just revealed this Twitter hack using Radio 1 feeds. You can sign up for track listings, SMS tag cloud data and other bits and bobs at twitter/bbcradio1

In related audio radio twitter news, word reaches us (via various places including Gordo on the mailing list ) of Steve Bowbricks new niche twittering experiment; Listen with BowbrickThis, as the name doesn't suggest, is devoted to exclusively mini reviews and links to Radio 4 programmes. Steve has been on his blog, a long time fan of R4 and implores us at the end of his post announcing this mini venture to

I'm kind of assuming that the go-ahead geeks at the Beeb will want to offer some kind of slightly more formal Beeb/Twitter mashup soon enough – like something, for instance, that will allow you to embed a short URL automatically or something that would work from a mobile (wouldn't it be entirely cool if you could receive a tweet referencing a Radio 4 show on your mobile and then click to listen to it?).

Well I don't know if we've got any go ahead geeks but this is a neat new way of using Twitter which I heartily recomend signing up for. Any others out there ? (now off to do posts about Tube Twitter and Speak Twitter in the ideas section Tom and Davy!)

(Jem Stone wrote this post).

Yesterday (21st Feb) at the future of webapps there was a Panel Debate about what Europe could learn from American in regards to the startup culture. We captured the whole debate on a small camcorder. Including the part where one of the most prolific voices of silicon valley, Michael Arrington from TechCrunch.com. Voiced his feelings for the BBC's efforts online. He added...

The BBC should be dissolved

And started to make a joke about the office TV programme. He then talked about CBBC World and how the BBC were distorting the industry. Daniel Morris a developer at BBC Manchester spoke afterwards and pointed out to Mike Arrington that everything the BBC does must pass the public value test.

Matthew Cashmore afterwards made the point that CBBC World is actually created by an independent company and not the BBC.

We would publicly love to invite Michael Arrington to come in, talk with people and for us to talk about some of his comments, as its obvious he has the wrong end of the stick.

Anyway, we have the video. So you can all judge for yourselves. Please join the debate about this issue by signing up to the backstage mailing list...

This entry was updated - for grammar and spelling

Ian Forrester - backstage.bbc.co.uk

Following out first podcast, there has been quite a lot of views expressed. Some very heated, some just saying thanks, here's some of the best.

The podcast is both heartening and frustrating. The BBC had so much promise a few years ago, back when it was talking about delivering real, world-class public value to license payers by doing the hard work of clearing the footage in the archive and letting the public remix it. Now that vision has been reduced to a sham -- the BBC iPlayer, a steaming pile of DRM that restricts you to being a mere consumer of BBC programming, downloading it to your PC for a mere seven days.

For a minute there, the BBC seemed like it would enable a creative nation. Now it's joining the jerks in Hollywood who think that media exists to be passively swallowed by a legion of glassy eyed zombie audience members.

You can hear the disappointment in the visionaries at the BBC, the betrayal at being sold out by management. The BBC is forcing Britons to buy an American operating system -- Windows -- in order to watch British programming, made in Britain. The free and open GNU/Linux -- whose kernel is maintained in Britain -- can't be used for British TV, because of DRM.

I think it’s great that the BBC was able to bring this debate into the public, and in fine BBC balanced round-table tradition it offers representatives from the BBC, the commercial broadcast sector and proponents of free distribution.

I hope there will be more of these, opening up what’s going on inside the organization’s future media dept. Not only does it begin to allow cluetrainy conversation to occur across the decision making process, but it seems like the appropriate thing for a license fee funded organization to be doing.

The group make some VERY interesting points, including a more detailed discussion (with real world examples) of how the BBC doesn’t actually own all the rights to ANYTHING and the nightmare involved in finding out who does - this gives an interesting explanation of why iPlayer content can’t be DRM free.

The other problem is that the BBC wouldn't be allowed to stick its content out un-DRMd even if it wanted to. That's what this whole Trust thing has been about. As Ofcom's Market Impact Assessment highlighted, the BBC entering this market affects other TV channels' business models regarding selling downloads, as well as third party companies such as iTunes.

This is a fine example of how complicated rights matters are in the new media world. It will be some time before put to bed the old notions of rights and true consumption habits of users and embrace what is ahead.

If you pay for BBC programming, they’ll probably listen to you. You can help make the BBC the beacon of DRM-free, platform-agnostic programming it can be.

This has been the cause of vigorous debate in the UK, but the BBC sees it as an choice between doing nothing or doing something—and they have decided to do something. The BBC Trust, the group set up at the beginning of this year under the Corporation's new charter, is responsible for signing off on the plans. Although it generally approves of the direction that the BBC is headed, it did raise a question about DRM.

Nate Anderson for Ars Technica. Ars Technica also has a web based forum with lots of comments and debate.

Continue reading "Responses to the first Backstage Podcast" »