Kid Helios

This piece is the first of several looking at the potential of IPTV and interactive services to reach learners. This piece is a reflection on a project that started ten years ago, and with some recent discussions of current possibilities, I thought it would be helpful to evaluate and document what happened then, before continuing to look at current and future possibilities.

In the year 2000 I’d had been working at the BBC for a few years, in TV as a producer and director, as well as for BBC online and on red button interactive TV projects. At the beginning of the year I was based at Bush House, working as part of a small team producing new services for the digital cable platform. D-cable offered a variety of set top boxes with limited functionality and rudimentary graphics capabilities. There was a lot of interest within the BBC in how we served audiences with channels and programme brands alongside enhanced interactivity. Day to day my job was to generate new ideas for migrating brands like Newsround onto the platform, working with designers, coders and testers in a somewhat wild west environment. Freeview was still two years away at this point, and Sky Digital was only two years old.

Media Landscape

2000 also saw the arrival of Greg Dyke as Director General at the BBC which ushered in a  period of increased morale and positivity within the organisation and a real feeling that it was possible to get interesting work done. Staff were issued with yellow card style ‘cut the crap’ cards to wave in meetings and the internal market that Dyke’s predecessor John Birt had introduced was swept away in an atmosphere of ‘make it happen’. As part of that spirit Dyke launched a new IPTV project that became known as Project Hull. The proposition involved a partnership between the BBC and Kingston Communications in the city of Kingston Upon Hull. Kingston Communications has started life as a municipal telephone company that back in 1914 had never joined the GPO, and had instead operated as a civic and then commercial enterprise. As a result the city of Hull was equipped with what at the time was super fast broadband – an ADSL fat pipe to homes, school and businesses that was wide enough to offer on-demand video and interactivity. The city was to be a living laboratory of ADSL and the BBC were to be in at the ground floor of the experiment.

Connecting Locally

George Auckland asked me onto the project as senior producer of formal and informal learning content. I worked for George, along with a fantastic team for the next few years, commissioning and producing interactive TV content for the KITV IPTV platform and learning a whole load in the process. Project Hull turned into ‘BBC Connecting Locally’, which was supported by £25 million of investment, leading to new services and initiatives for the people of Hull, Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. These included a new TV region called BBC Yorkshire and Lincolnshire and a new building that was to be the base of Radio Humberside and a new open open centre for public access and engagement.

BBC Headstart

There was pan-BBC interest and involvement in the project – not surprising given the level of investment and the corporate, political and social imperatives at play. News, sport, drama, and entertainment were just some of the BBC departments that worked alongside Learning to create applications and content for the platform. Activity ebbed and flowed, but the Learning presence remained constant for a number of reasons due in part to Headstart, the learning orientated project within a project. Headstart was a partnership between BBC Learning, Hull City Learning and Hull City Vision and focused much of its activity on Hull’s Bransholme estate. Bransholme is one of the largest social housing estates in Europe, with widespread social and economic deprivation alongside high levels of unemployment. The project was interested in the power of digital learning, with the advantage that content could be piped to home and school via the broadband network.

KIT IPTV Technology

At the start of of Project Hull, Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) was understood to be mean the delivery of video on demand (VoD) over Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) to a TV set via a set top box (STB). The subscription service launched in Hull in September 1999 so the BBC were involved right at the ground floor. At that point KIT were the only providers of IPTV in the UK – later on they were joined in London by Homechoice – now known as TalkTalk TV. The original STB was manufactured by Pace and contained within it the chipset for an old Acorn Archimedes RISC computer.  It was possible (although rare) to connect the back of the box to a printer and text entry was enabled via an wireless infrared keyboard. From the servers it was possible to deliver video streams, video-on-demand (VOD) and basic HTML, JavaScript and MySQL/PHP. Video was formatted as MPEG 1 in an MPEG 2 transport stream. Later on in the trial it even became possible to run games and home office packages from the servers to the home.

Projects – GCSE Bitesize

For a formal learning audience GCSE Bitsize is the stand-out brand offering revision advice for students studying for their GCSE exams. At that time GCSE Bitesize’s presence was extending online, but was also supported by a whole range of TV programming which was available on a linear record and play service via late night BBC2. Headstart aimed to segment and make available much of the content in key subject areas via on-demand IPTV. The Bitesize product was the first one that we brought to the IPTV platform, and over time was added to, revised and improved.  At the very start of the project our understanding of the capability of the box was rudimentary, but over time we innovated and developed more sophisticated editorial and technical approaches to the possibilities of IPTV.

One of the greatest breakthroughs in our understanding of the technology came while we were developing a revised version of the original GCSE Bitesize IPTV service. Up until that point navigation and menu screens were static with overlaid STB generated graphics and HTML. Navigation was via the TV remote with available colour buttons, number keys and up, down, left, right and select buttons. Moving around the TV screen screen revealed clunky looking ‘bounding boxes’ indicating clickable content. The greatest innovation at this point was pioneered by the Learning team and centered around ‘time-line-jumping’ which enabled the possibility of full screen interactive video menus and rapid location of and navigation to content.

Imagine that a menu was required with six available button options, each in turn taking the viewer to a eight button sub-menu, and finally down to the secondary sub-menu of five content package options. Previously on each button press a new HTML page would have to load, and although some caching within the box was possible, the process was slow and inelegant. The menu pages were static and featured the previously mentioned clunky looking bounding boxes.

The new navigation system recreated the menus and sub-menus but in full screen video in the edit. The first menu would mix onto the screen and would stay there for perhaps five minutes on a holding cycle. If the STB didn’t detect any sub-menu selection button-press, the code instructed the video to jump back to the beginning point of the menu, repeating the process endlessly until it detected a selection. The video was cunningly edited so that the beginning and end frame of the video menu was identical and therefore the ‘jump’ was to all intents invisible to a viewer. What this meant was that as programme makers we could depend on ‘to the frame’ accuracy in jumping forwards and back through a video stream. The video stream held on the server could carry any number of menus and sub-menus, edited onto the beginning of the longer content packages. In the case of the Bitesize product this meant that a viewer could drill down in a matter of seconds to find the exact content package on the exact subject of their choice. In the final version of the product there was around seventeen hours of available content spanning the subject areas of English, Maths, Science, and Geography made speedily navigable via frame accurate jumps forward and back through the video stream.

Projects – SOS Teacher

SOS Teacher was an ambitious project that extended the GCSE Bitesize product, blending live TV with on-demand. The product gave young people in Hull access via their TV’s to live GCSE revision advice from subject specialist teachers in the run up to their exams. The product was promoted in schools around the region with a specific subject focus each night for the two week period running up to the exams. In an exciting innovation a texting function was mapped to the number keys on the TV remote, which meant that as well as being able to phone through a question, students could text a question direct from their sofa to a teacher, who could then potentially answer that question on ‘live’ TV’. The ‘live TV’ was in effect an on-the-fly digitised feed, streamed to the KIT servers and then on to the viewers at home.

The teachers that we recruited were really enthusiastic about the project and brought a tremendous energy and enthusiasm to the spectacle. In the original version of SOS Teacher the production standards were basic, with one locked off camera on the teacher, with a connected PC taking the audience questions and a runner ferrying them forwards and back to the teacher. We would be live on camera for 90 minutes, a gruelling experience for all concerned. In later iterations we have several teachers in the studio, two cameras, and a library of pre-recorded stings and VT that could be vision mixed to provide chances for a studio reshuffle and very necessary breaks. We provided a graphics tablet and interactive white board, which we could mix to so that teachers could sketch if they needed to. As well as the KIT service, we began to offer a local radio opt out, so that students without access to the KIT service could also benefit from the service and as part of the trial, and the service was also streamed to Hull’s big screen. All of the live content was segmented, packaged and tagged up so that it was available the following day as part of the on-demand service.

Projects – CITZN-H

CITZN-H was a response to the recently introduced topic of citizenship within the UK national curriculum. Young people could access on-demand ‘stimulus films’ that had been commissioned in-house on a range of topics including conflict, racism, money and body image. They were then encouraged to respond with their own personal and locally orientated audience generated content. Workshops were run in schools, youth and community centres, and the BBC employed Alan Raw, local musician, DJ, community worker and filmmaker to act as local facilitator. Over time we had hundreds of films submitted to us that were digitised and in turn made available via the service. The quality of the films was amazing with some intensely personal, funny and moving submissions. Alan was a fantastic enabler and his dedication to the project had a real impact in raising the technical quality of the submissions as well as making it possible for more and more of the community generated films to be be included. It was amazing to see the confidence of the filmmakers growing as they gained the skills and the confidence to articulate their own feelings on issues around global topics.

One of the most memorable films for me was one that two young homeless women had shot in the bedroom of their hostel. They had written a poem about their experiences of escaping abusive families and becoming homeless, and couldn’t allow their faces to appear on camera. The pictures of the walls of the refuge together with their powerful commentary on their situation they were in was very humbling. The project provided them with a voice and a platform that they wouldn’t otherwise have had.

Projects – Hull Time Machine

Back in 1995 some workmen in Blackburn uncovered three metal milk churns filled with spools of what turned out to be very early films from the Mitchell and Kenyon film company. Mitchell and Kenyon’s films were shot from the late nineteenth century through to about 1907 and record life in regional Britain, including a whole selection of films that has been shot in Hull. Following restoration by the BFI, the films became available, and we decided to create a an IPTV product aound them. We designed Steampunk style menus, and commissioned new films which which presented guides to the local region as well as instruction on how to get started with conducting your own local or family history research.

The films are of an amazingly high quality given their age, and were very popular with varied audiences who were delighted to see what their city and the population looked like almost one hundred years ago. The BBC worked with local history groups to host hour long ‘patch walks’ that met at the BBC Open Centre and took groups who had been inspired by the IPTV product out and about to discover more about their city and it’s history.

More coming soon on how BBC Learning tackled the commissioning and creation of new projects and services using IPTV and thoughts on what current technology offers for via platforms such as Canvas and Google TV.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about storytelling for several reasons. Firstly in the day job we are doing some investigation into new ways of telling stories and new narrative forms as a means of reaching new audiences. Over the past year I’ve looked after a few projects that have taken storytelling in different sorts of directions. These kind of stories are exactly the sort of things that I think we should be doing at the Castle and I plan to blog about them separately in more detail. One project uses in car GPS to deliver stories to families on the move. Another drama ‘Over the Bridge‘ presents a forty part fragmented narrative to a younger audience via bluetooth to their mobile phones, and invites them to share, collect and watch the material (video, txt and voicemail) to make sense of the story.

The second reason is that I’ve started to write again after a long break – I have an idea for a book that I’ve begun to get down, and in thinking about it, I’m beginning to realise that my sensibilities around storytelling have now changed – and that in fact the opportunities that transmedia storytelling could bring to my story, could change it into something different entirely. I think that the evolved story is actually the one that I want to tell. The narrative will still have to work – even better than it would have before – but the approach will be more playful and that playfulness is liberating and is really the thing that has made me want to come back to doing some creative writing in the first place.

The starting point for the musings on transmedia storytelling were some thoughts around ‘the book’ itself – the traditional physical structure that encloses the story – the portable object that contains pages, text, pictures and information – the books I’m addicted to buying and that I can never throw away. I love the fact that books don’t need plugs or power cables – you can read them in bed, on the beach and in the bath. Books smell nice and bookshops and libraries are places of discovery – I would rather spend an hour on my own wandering around a good bookshop than almost anywhere.

A couple of years ago I was doing some early stage research into the idea of a classroom based ARG. I’d seen Elan Lee give a talk at ETech and one of the projects that he’d profiled was ‘Year Zero‘, an ARG on behalf of Nine Inch Nails, which had culminated in a secret gig, armed SWAT teams and generally the sort of full on adult ARG experience that you might expect in support of a Trent Reznor concept album. I asked Elan how he thought an ARG could be configured for a younger audience and he suggested a text book as a starting point. This seemed to be a very interesting idea and one that I’m still very keen to explore, where the book becomes the rabbit hole that propels a school class into a story. What appealed to me the most was an idea that developed over time – which was that the classroom teacher (who would initiate the ARG) could direct the student who most ‘needed’ to find the book towards it – that the book itself would be hiding in plain sight within the school library – and that within the fabric of the book would be all of the clues and structures necessary to start a group of students on an adventure that none of them would ever forget.

So back to the book – and the cover of the book. I love the artwork on bookcovers – you might not be able to judge a book by the cover, but who cares when you see something that tickles you into a bookshop to pick up and buy. When I was a kid I loved the artwork or Edward Ardizone, Charles Keeping, Arthur Ransome, E. H. Shepard – but what if the cover of that book could become alive. Memoires was a situationist collaboration between Asger Jorn and Guy Debord in the 1950’s. The cover of the book was made of heavy duty sandpaper, and the idea was that over time the book would have a destructive effect on the neghbouring books on the shelf. The naughty situationists imagined a passive aggressive book-cover – something that wold scratch the bourgeois coffee tables. Now we have book covers that can talk directly to us - A recent edition of Esquire magazine featured an augmented reality cover – that brought cover star Robert Downey Jr perkily to life.

So maybe now you can judge a book by the cover..?

I recently went to see a panel discussion at the Encounters short film festive, entitled ‘Pimp Your Story: Amplifying Your Film Online’, which featured my friend Hazel Grian who is a writer, performer and ARG creator, who works on very large scale commercial projects, as well as other more publicly orientated projects such as the British Red Cross ‘Traces of Hope‘. Alongside her on the panel was Matt Golding from viral agency Rubberduction and Ben Dowden who is a filmmaker with real experience of what works and why out there in the real world – more of that later. The audience was predominantly short filmmakers looking for insights into how to make the internet work for them as a means of distributing their films, reaching an audience, breaking through and doubtless making some money. It was a useful panel that made me want to capture the thoughts of the contributors as well as some of my own conclusions – so here goes…

The big question for traditional media outlets with public service at their heart, bottom line on the mind or earnest art movie makers is what is the magic formula to make the internet work to your benefit? Is there a lotion that when applied to a product acts like a viral pheromone to arouse and attract an online audience? In other words – what are the ‘Viral Secrets from the Ancient Transmedia Masters of MuMu’?

The discussion at Encounters started off with the observation that the traditional filmmaking industry is still a bit scared of the internet. Distributors of short films might demand exclusive rights and there’s the old chestnut of certain competitions also insisting that submissions are exclusive to their site. I’ve talked on panels at documentary conferences in the past and a few years ago there was a type of xenophobic fear radiating from some of the old media outlets. The filmmakers themselves often felt that they would end up signing rights away, and the already very tight margins would shrink as they inevitably ended up being squeezed out. The truce between old media and filmmakers signed in the no mans land of multiplatform led to the creation of a number of publicly and privately funded initiatives that tried to persuade an online audience to pay for factual content. The view was that these freakish on-demand TV hybrids would satisfy distributors, filmmakers, advertisers and audience. In the real world it didn’t work, and the search for the formula continued.

The big shift in those few years has been from a ‘bums on seats’ approach to an ‘eyeballs on screen’ one. Now the instinct to engage with the internet often comes from within the marketing department, where there is a realisation of the power of the web to reach distributed audiences, and through the social aspect of the web also to engage with the audience on an intimate level. This potent understanding of the audience is great for filmmakers in helping to make their work better, but is also clearly intelligence and access that is worth its weight in gold to advertisers.

At Encounters Matt screened some movies putting forward Black Hole as an example of one of those breakthrough films that sets the internet alight. Sitting within the Futureshorts YouTube channel this film runs at around two and a half minutes and has had to date enjoyed an eye watering five and a half million views. It’s clever, elegant, (probably) low budget and well acted. It has no dialogue which gives it an international transferable appeal. I watched it, liked it and immediately thought about people who I know who would also like it. It is – and here is the first ‘Viral Secret from the Ancient Transmedia Masters of MuMu’ – authentic. It is it’s authenticity that makes it work so well. As a viewer you have a relationship with the film that is genuine. It does what it does very well, and invites you to read it for what it is. It’s not selling you anything, pretending to be something bigger or more clever than what it is. Most audiences and in particular young, engaged digital natives can spot a pup when they’re being sold one.

Ben talked about his art and films – he uses a single locked off camera – and he lets the performers that he films speak for themselves. He’s uncompromising on the image and sound quality – watch Dub FX on Ben’s YouTube channel.

‘Love Someone‘ has been viewed two and a half million times. Structurally the films are shortish in length without complicated edits and because they are reasonably locked off they work well on the small screen.  Because of the number of views that he gets YouTube phoned and offered him a share of the advertising revenue and a funkier microsite. He’s stripped most of the ads off his films, because compromising his art isn’t what he’s about. He has a partnership with the artists that he works with – and the work that they produce together is a quality product – and quality is the second ‘Viral Secret from the Ancient Transmedia Masters of MuMu’. Make something good, and people will want to see it – simples…

Hazel’s approach to ARGs is to regard them as another way to tell great stories – she’s a writer and a filmmaker – and she screened You Suck at Photoshop as an example of a weird hybrid that works and works very well. What is there not to like about seeing a fragmenting marriage through the lens of the instructional video – genius. Hazel made the point that new artistic forms are emerging all the time now, as new technology and mediums bang up against one another. New platforms can link across the web, allow performance, improvisation, role playing and engagement outside of the window of viewing. But to do that well, you need to take secrets one and two of the ‘Ancient Transmedia Masters of MuMu’, and merge them seamlessly with an insightful understanding of the most important of all of the secrets – the audience. Knowing your audience, anticipating their reactions, and now more than ever entering into a dialogue with then through the medium of your authentic, quality product is the recipe for viral nirvana.

Over lunch with George, the discussion turned to the interestingly auspicious day next year of October 10th 2010, or in other words 10/10/10. In binary 101010 is 42 – which as everyone knows, is the meaning of life, the universe and everything. Gasp…

That got us thinking about whether October 10th next year could be used as a day for a positive celebration of the web. A ‘Wonderful Web Wingding’ Day – or hopefully something better titled – you get the gist.

The feeling is that the web is pretty wonderful and transformative, but that it gets routinely kicked by a combination of lazy journalism, negative hype, deliberate obfuscation or plain old evil regime. It can be used for nefarious purposes, but it can also be used as a tool for real positive change – so why not have a day to celebrate all the good things about the web, and to ponder how it can be even better in the future?

Who’s with us..?

From the beginning of October I’m going to be starting a new job at the BBC. It’s all very exciting, and I hope will build on the development work that I’ve been leading for the BBC Learning Development team over the last two years. I’m going to be setting up a development unit within the Vision MPP products department (breathe) – doing rapid development of new ‘of the web’ products. I’ve been sporadically blogging for the last few years – most recently I started to collect AR links and videos here – but I’m now going to make a real effort to collect thoughts and findings as I go here, on this very site.