80 Years of the Beeb Online

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Brian and team, who work for a digital marketing agency run this Digital Crosstalk blog.
Occasionally we might blog about companies and people we work with but for the most part we'll simply be blogging about stories and events which we find interesting.

18th
JUN

Posted by Brian | Filed under blogging

Here’s a test for you. Imagine how many episodes of television programmes the BBC produces every week. Now imagine how many it produces every month. Every year? Okay. Now multiply that by eighty and you have the latest project of the British Broadcasting Company – building web pages for every single episode of television that it has ever produced. Every single one.

The ambitious venture was outlined by the director of BBC Vision, Jana Bennett, at the Banff television festival in Canada. She described the plan to add the back catalogue of BBC programmes onto individual web pages for each episode would feature “all the information we have on the richest TV and radio archive in the world.”

Executives at the BBC are hoping the move will bulk up its website, which is a bit of an understatement if it turns out they succeed. Blogger Emily of OMG with Emily jokes that the BBC is, in fact, going to use up all the internet which probably isn’t possible, but crazier things have happened.

The plan is, eventually, to not only archive pages for every BBC-produced television episode, but to make available the actual episodes themselves, allowing the world to access thousands of programmes that they would otherwise never have a chance to view. The pages will “always direct the audience to the programme – wherever it may be on the web – first in iPlayer, then elsewhere on bbc.co.uk” said Simon Nelson, who is overseeing the project.

So, providing the BBC doesn’t ‘use up the internet’ and succeeds in its aspirations to archive every episode of everything ever on the internet, what are people interested in watching? Naturally, SciFiPulse.net seems pretty excited about old-school Doctor Who, Day of the Triffids and A for Andromeda.

On the Sci-Fi vein, I’m looking forward to Red Dwarf. This project is smegging cool.