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Why on demand changes everything

Mark Thompson, director general of the BBC, on the move to on-demand, the BBC media player, downloads, streaming, and the development of BBC 2.0.

On demand is about making existing content far more available to the people who paid for it in the first place. It’s a new means to achieve an end which has always been part of our mission.

For our licence-payers it means greater convenience and greater value, not because we expect them to consume more content in absolute terms but because we would expect more of the content they do consume to be more directly relevant and attractive to them.

On demand enables them to personalise what was once a series of one-to-many offerings from the BBC.

MyBBCPlayer is sometimes talked about as if it was a major new departure for the BBC.

I do think it marks a watershed — a major expansion of choice and functionality and a recognition that on demand is going to become an important — perhaps ultimately the most important — way in which we will put great content in front of the public.

But in fact we already offer wide-ranging on demand services for both TV and radio programmes.

The iMP trial
The Player is a logical extension of these existing services and experiments. Let me tell you about our trial.

It was a closed trial involving 5,000 people across the UK, balanced to ensure that the group reflected the population as accurately as possible – and not just the geeks and download experts. It started last November and finished at the end of February.

The service enabled users to catch up on TV and radio programmes from the previous seven days.

The trial used peer-to-peer technology so that, instead of having to unicast each programme file to each individual PC, it could meet each new request for a programme file from other PCs on the network who had already downloaded that file.

Each file — and each packet of each file being moved around by peer-to-peer — had a Digital Rights Management or DRM wrapper around it. It was encrypted, in other words.

When each new user sought to open the file, their PC sent a request to the BBC server and, once our server was satisfied that they had the appropriate approvals, in this case that they were a member of the trial, we sent a unique key so that they could open and watch or listen to the file. But they were not able to copy or move the file from their PC and at the end of the seven days the file expired.

The trial, in other words, offered an opportunity to catch and view but not to own — and one of the purposes of the trial was to test the integrity of this rights management system.

All the evidence suggests that it proved very robust. And of course this kind of time-limited, restricted on demand proposition offers rights holders greater protection and more options for effective rights exploitation than traditional home recording does – whether by VHS or PVR.

So how did the trial go? We’re still working through the results, but some conclusions are already clear.

First, the triallists were overwhelmingly positive about the application. 74 per cent said they would recommend it to a friend. A strong majority agreed that it was something the BBC should offer as part of its public service delivery because of the control and flexibility it offered to licence-payers to find programmes they valued.

Second, the so-called long tail effect really came into play. Our cable on demand trials with their more limited choices of titles have seen requests dominated by some of our best-known titles — EastEnders, Little Britain and so on.

In the case of the Player, 85 per cent of all titles made available were downloaded.

Again comedy, key dramas and mainstream documentaries loomed large but many niche programmes — programmes which often struggle to reach a substantial audience on linear channels – were both downloaded and viewed.

The combination of on demand and a wide variety of choice does not seem to lead to a clustering of interest around a handful of well-known titles. On the contrary, users go exploring.

This is very different from the serendipity of the classic public service schedule, that idea of the mass audience being led by chance or cunning scheduling into something challenging or improving. This is user-led and driven by individual curiosity or need.

We also know, though we don’t yet have detailed figures, that most of the programmes which were downloaded were actually watched.

At least among this sample group, the ratio of viewing to downloading seems to be much higher than in the case of other forms of TV recording.

So what didn’t they like?

Well first, broadband speed is important. Even at reasonably high speeds — two megabits a second, say — the downloads take quite a long time; though you can, of course, run them in the background or indeed book them in advance as you can with Sky Plus.

Secondly, quite a few of the triallists objected to the seven-day rule. Why couldn’t they hold onto unwatched programme files for longer? After all, viewers are allowed to keep programmes on VHS or PVR indefinitely.

So towards the end of the trial we investigated with a number of variations on the ‘use it or lose it in a week’ theme, trying to find the best fit between user convenience and a fair position on the rights.

We’ll look at the results and, if necessary, adjust the proposal in the light of the user experience.

The future
We also want to make large parts of the BBC archive available through the Player: too many of our greatest treasures remain inaccessible to the public.

We also believe that a carefully selected and defined portion of the archive should be available for the public to use and repurpose themselves, whether as part of curriculum-based learning projects or for purely creative ends.

This is what we call the Creative Archive. It’s a vision we’re collaborating on with other broadcasters and archive-holders.

But we recognise that the Creative Archive raises particular rights and market impact issues and it will not form part of the initial Player approval or release.

But adding substantial archive resources to the Player is really only the start.

At present, the Player allows the downloading of files. Elsewhere, as you’ve heard, we enable users to live-stream BBC services and programmes.

In the future, we expect both downloading and streaming to develop rapidly.

The BBC is working with ISPs to explore a range of options by which live TV can be scalably broadcast over the open internet across the UK.

One possibility we are actively looking at is live, peer-to-peer streaming. It is already big in China, led by piracy services.

We want to look at how this innovative technique can be used legitimately, but we believe that there is potential for streaming of TV channels with a latency or delay of perhaps a couple of minutes to become available within 12 months: you have to imagine BBC ONE being streamed to a number of PCs, packetised, sent to thousands of more PCs, reassembled, and watched in a matter of seconds.

Another option which we are looking at involves working with internet service providers to consider an upgrade to the whole UK internet.

Together with ITV we recently launched a technical trial of the multicasting technology which could achieve this.

We are broadcasting all our TV channels and national radio networks for the next six months to the subscribers of the handful of advanced UK ISPs who support this new layer on the internet.

We’ll be looking at the outcome of this experiment, together with the other options, to work out the best way of making free-to-air live TV over the Internet a reality for audiences in the UK.

If we’re right and technology allows us to do that, then an utter revolution in broadcasting becomes possible.

It is quite feasible to imagine the BBC offering every enabled licence-payer the possibility of fully personalised, drag-and-drop TV channels.

You come home. You look on the screen at a storyboard for each of our TV schedules for tonight. You drag and drop the programmes you want to watch into whatever order you want and then press play.

Or you make your schedule up out of the archive.

Or you let us propose a series of virtual thematic channels: comedy, natural history, sport.

Or you let us propose a channel based on your previous choices or the recommendations of your friends.

This is not the far future. For broadband users, who will probably be well over half the country by then, this is less than five years away.

And the second part of the revolution is the movement of media around the house and around people’s lives.

The Player trial is web-based: apart from the few techno-savvy users who already knew how to connect their PCs to the TVs, or to their PDAs, all those taking part in the trial had to watch the downloaded programmes on their PCs.

Quite quickly we expect many more households to adopt a range of solutions for moving media from PC to TV and vice versa and from fixed devices to mobile ones and back again.

We want to make Player and Player-like functionality for BBC content available to as many licence-payers as possible on as many platforms and devices as possible.

We are very happy to work with proprietary systems and operators as well as open systems like the web to deliver our content as conveniently as we can to the public.

In the end, though, we believe it is likely and desirable that open, fully interoperable systems supported by common, effective Digital Rights Management controls, should become standard across platforms and devices.

This picture of a possible on demand future is part of a bigger story — which is the BBC’s response to what is often referred to as Web 2.0.

The second chapter in the web’s history requires other changes from the BBC: a much greater focus on content management and supported metadata to allow for sophisticated search and navigation, a shift of gravity from text towards rich audio-visual content across the piece, an engagement with user-generated content, user-recommendation and personalisation which goes beyond anything I’ve touched upon this evening.

And it requires a different kind of BBC, a BBC that continues to generate content which drives public value, but now content that can last and which can be repurposed over time and across multiple platforms.

Not a traditional broadcaster with a rather good website but a deliverer of high quality content over the web and other digital channels with, yes, some rather wonderful traditional TV and radio channels still in our portfolio.

That’s a transition that will take place over time but that’s where we’re headed: towards the BBC 2.0.

BBC 2.0
Now we believe that our Player — and, more broadly, our commitment to ensure that bbc.co.uk is at the leading edge of Web 2.0 — will drive broadband.

It will encourage those who are not on line to go on line. It will encourage those who are not on broadband to adopt it.

And within broadband it will encourage users to consider higher and higher speeds.

The next stage of the internet’s development will see dramatic change.

In the nineties, the BBC played a significant role — of course alongside many others — in getting Britain to take the internet seriously and to use it as a useful, practical resource.

We believe that we have a significant role once more in helping to ensure that this country remains in the vanguard.

Our critics would have you believe that the BBC is platform-specific. It’s really and should definitely remain a linear TV and radio broadcaster. It has no real business getting involved in new digital media.

Well our audiences beg to differ. bbc.co.uk is already one of our most popular services and is regarded by its users as being every bit as essential as BBC television and radio.

In terms of functionality and scope, as the Player trial shows, our audiences are willing us on: asking for richer content, better search, more options, faster response times.

But more than that, the whole idea that media should be platform-specific is outdated.

Already BBC News is a proposition which transcends any one platform.

We deliver it on the web, to mobile devices, on radio, on TV. It’s local, it’s national, it’s global. Increasingly we think of it as a single proposition.

The same will ultimately be true of all of our content.

Future audiences will move effortlessly from medium to medium, from device to device. That implies a very different BBC.

But it doesn’t mean that the BBC is turning away from its fundamental mission.
On the contrary, technology means that we can fulfil that public service mission more effectively than ever before.

In the end, that is why on demand changes everything.

This is an edited extract from the inaugural Royal Television Society Baird Lecture given by the BBC director general Mark Thompson, 22 March 2006.

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