Erik Huggers

July 19, 2010 World Screen


This interview was originally published in the MIPTV 2010 issue of World Screen.
 
A leader in catch-up TV, BBC’s iPlayer allows viewers in the U.K. to find and play programs from the past seven days and watch them online. And this is not merely a selection of BBC shows—it is nearly the entire television and radio output of the British public broadcaster. Viewer response to the service, Erik Huggers explains, has been equally massive.
 
WS: How did the idea to offer programs online come about?
HUGGERS: BBC has been on the Internet since 1994. This organization is always trying to be at the forefront of where technology meets great storytelling that informs, educates and entertains. If you look at the history of the BBC, in the 1920s the very first director general was actually an engineer, Lord John Reith. He built out a nationwide analogue radio network, that’s what he cared about. He wanted to have a way to inform, educate and entertain the masses and he started with the technology that was available at that point, which was radio. In the following 88 years, our research and development arm has always been at the forefront of technology, with inventions like NICAM stereo sound, teletext and digital radio. It’s always been the marriage on one end of technology and distribution capability and, on the other hand, fantastic content.
 
The BBC was already on the Internet back in 1994, which for a broadcaster was really early. The idea of starting to time-shift and place-shift our programs was actually born many years ago. I remember it was called Interactive Media Player (IMP) when they tried out the concept. Once that was tested and they knew that consumers were interested in it, I was hired. The main thing I was brought in for—this was three years ago—was to actually deliver on the concept, because it’s one thing to have fantastic creative ideas, and it’s a whole different thing to actually execute against them.
 
WS: What was iPlayer like in its early development stages?
HUGGERS: There were some pretty key decisions that we took very early on that led to its success. The original idea for iPlayer was that it was going to be a Windows-computer-only, peer-to-peer, download-only thing. One of the first decisions I made was that the IMP would have to be available across as many platforms as possible, that it wasn’t about peer-to-peer and downloading. Instead, it was about streaming and instant gratification, and it had to be really strongly branded, tying in nicely to all the linear capability that we have in reaching consumers and educating them around this functionality. Just bringing it back to principles of making this service incredibly simple, but at the same time incredibly useful, guided a lot of our decision making.
 
So while on the surface the proposition may look like it’s a bit simple, the truth is, in January of this year we delivered 120 million videos to the U.K. market alone and that is a country with only 60 million inhabitants and only 65 percent of them are online. The average consumption time is 24 minutes per session for video, and 186 minutes for radio per session.
 
WS: What contributed to making iPlayer so successful?
HUGGERS: What I think contributed greatly is the clarity of the proposition. If you compare it to Hulu, for example, iPlayer is actually very dissimilar. With iPlayer we have an ambition for everything that the BBC transmits on its linear portfolio—everything across eight national networks of television, ten national networks of radio and [more than 40] local radio networks—[to be] available online for seven days after it was transmitted. So the proposition is simple: if you missed it, you will find it on iPlayer. Whereas with things like Hulu, and other similar sites, if you’ve missed it, there might be a chance that you can catch up with it. And so we went all the way with all the rights holders, we went all the way in making sure that there was parity between our transmission schedules and what was available on iPlayer.
 
Number two was the whole idea of getting it on to as many devices as possible. iPlayer is now available on Windows, Macintosh, Nintendo Wii, PlayStation3, on the main cable MSOs, it’s available on about 20 different devices. So the whole concept is, if you’ve missed it, no matter what you use, no matter where you are, there is a very high chance that you have access to all that content at your fingertips, on whatever platform you happen to use. So we have a complete platform-neutral approach.
 
Just to give an idea of the volume of content, every week we tip in a little over 400 hours of fresh video and a little over 2,000 hours of fresh radio content. So the sheer volume of the operation is not to be underestimated.
 
The final thought is, on all our linear channels and radio stations, there is a consistent call to action to our audiences, “If you’ve missed this, you can watch it on iPlayer.” So the calls to action that we have in our traditional linear television and radio domain are well coordinated and well set up to constantly remind people that the service is there for them.
 
WS: There is a feeling among many in the TV business that linear channels will lose their relevance as people increasingly watch programming on demand. Does iPlayer provide additive viewing or does it take viewing away from your linear channels?
HUGGERS: We are probably one of the only organizations on the planet that has this sort of linear capability as well as an on-demand capability that is successful. So I think we are in a good position to provide some input. My view is that it has been complementary so far. We see that when prime-time viewing tapers off in the linear world, it keeps going another hour in the on-demand world. That is actually quite interesting. There are certain areas, particularly with younger viewers, not surprisingly, where they seem to have an affinity with the on-demand world that is far greater than older generations have.
 
So if you look at the total number of viewers of a linear show, including the first transmission and repeats over a period of time, and you add to that the total number of on-demand viewings, for example for a show like EastEnders, the on-demand world is only a very, very small proportion of that universe. But if you look at a children’s program, there is one called M.I. High, online viewing is close to one-fifth of the total viewership.
 
WS: Are there certain genres—factual or entertainment or children’s—that are getting more play on iPlayer?
HUGGERS: The big hits on linear television and linear radio are the big hits in the on-demand space. What is interesting is that certain categories that in the linear world we consider as more niche seem to be punching above their weight online. In particular these are programs that are on BBC Three and BBC Four channels. BBC Three links into what we just said, it skews much younger. BBC Four, on the other hand, is more about documentaries, history and knowledge.
 
WS: Tell us about Project Canvas.
HUGGERS: Project Canvas is a partnership between the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Five, BT and TalkTalk Group—the key free-to-air broadcasters and the key broadband ISPs.
 
Our common goal as the shareholders of this new venture, which still requires final approval from the BBC Trust—we have interim approval—is to create an open-standard-spaced, next-generation television platform, that manages to bring the best of linear television and radio together with the best of what the Internet has to offer, all wrapped up in a single easy-to-use user experience. And so the logical extension is that the on-demand services from the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and others, are going to be made available through that platform right to the living room via your broadband connection. But it’s more than that. It’s not just on-demand as a single application. We believe that the iPhone led the way in other sorts of applications that have taken off tremendously. We have had interesting calls from organizations like the NHS [National Health Service], Tesco and many others, including small start-ups and newspapers, who want to build applications specifically for the Canvas platform and deliver new services into the living room. Project Canvas looks very promising; this has the potential, once and for all, to democratize access to the living room. In the past you needed to either own spectrum or be very wealthy, from a capital perspective, in order to build out cable or satellite networks. The beautiful thing of the Internet is it’s there and you can deliver all sorts of content through it.
 
WS: There are exciting times, aren’t they?
HUGGERS: Yes. The Chinese say, “May you live in interesting times,” and I do believe that we are at an inflection point for the industry, not just for how consumers interact, find, play and share media in the living room, but also on the go, in schools and at work.
 
WS: And with the wealth of content that the BBC produces, all of this offers wonderful possibilities.
HUGGERS: Correct, and one of the things my division is responsible for is managing the BBC Archive. We have 88 years of cultural heritage stored on 60 miles of shelf space in a big old fridge. So we have some serious plans that you’ll hear more about very soon, about how we are going to go about unlocking that national cultural heritage captured in audio, video, images, letters, sheet music, the list goes on—it’s quite astonishing.