The digital age
A thousand initiatives bloomed in the mid-1990s as BBC staff began to explore the internet and create web pages of their own
The technological innovations of the 1980s and 1990s enabled the BBC to bring audiences fresh content via new platforms. Yet, as DAVID HENDY explores in the final episode of his series charting the national broadcaster’s history, the rapidly changing media world also poses a threat to the future of the corporation
he playwright David Hare T wrote recently that, alongside the NHS and the welfare state, the BBC represents “the finest expression of mid-20th-century public idealism”. Yet, from our vantage point in the third decade of the 21st century, such praise can be a dangerous thing. It associates the BBC with past glories: the analogue era, “old media”, the world of radio and television. This raises a profound existential question for an organisation marking its 100th birthday. Having emerged in the first wireless age, can it survive in anything like its current form in the era of internet, mobile social media and highspending multinational streaming giants?
Before reaching for the most pessimistic answer, it’s worth remembering that the BBC kick-started Britain’s own media revolution in the first place. In the early 1980s, the corporation’s education department, alert to warnings of a shortage in computing skills, began working with colleagues in research and development, and with scientists employed by Acorn, to develop what became the BBC Micro. A personal computer designed to be both cheap and easy to use, the Micro – with its distinctive chunky keyboard and orange function keys – became a fixture in homes and classrooms. It enabled tens of thousands of adults and children with no previous computing experience to learn the so-called Basic programming language. And it was just one part of a wider computer literacy project built around TV programmes, instructional books and a support network for teachers.
This multi-pronged approach provided the template for another BBC project launched a decade later, focused this time on introducing the British public to the then-unfamiliar joys of the internet. The Net was a TV series that created “live” dialogue with its audience by setting up online bulletin boards and an email address.
A “BBC Networking Club” also sprang up to help viewers get online. By this stage, the corporation’s own programme-makers were also starting to connect to the world wide web. In large part this was thanks to one of its engineers, Brandon Butterworth, who had created an internal network of desktop computers and secured a website domain: bbc.co.uk.
A thousand initiatives bloomed in the mid-1990s as staff throughout the corporation began to explore the internet and create web pages of their own. In one corner, the Hungarian Service created its own pages to accompany programmes; in another, “Trumptonshire Web” sprang up to celebrate the children’s TV series, Trumpton. Radio 1 created a live chat facility, and the recently launched news-and-sport network Five Live turned its 606 phone-in for football fans into one of the busiest messageboards in the country. Then, for the May 1997 general election, journalists came up with an 8,000page site to provide up-to-date details of the results as they came in.
Blazing a trail
Initially this digital evolution was all rather organic and spontaneous, but in 1997 there was a decisive intervention from the top. The BBC’s director general, John Birt, had been talking to Nicholas Negroponte, author of Being Digital. This book had set out a striking techno-utopian vision of the future in which an “information superhighway” would deliver entirely virtual newspapers and personalised forms of entertainment to millions of private computers. After flying to the US to visit companies engaged with this new technology, including Netscape and Microsoft, Birt returned a fully fledged convert. He was, he said, convinced that the internet “was a Very Big Thing that was going to change the world, and that the BBC had to be at the centre of it”.
Over the next six months, all of the experimental work which had been simmering away was pulled together into a slicker,
more-coherent offering. The first tangible outcome of this concerted effort was supposed to be the autumn launch of an online news service. The sudden death of Princess Diana at the end of August forced the pace: this was the kind of dramatic, fast-moving and increasingly complicated story that required web pages to be constantly updated. Presented with an unending supply of fresh interviews on radio and TV, BBC journalists began experimenting with embedding short “grabs” of audio and video. They created a tribute site, and arranged a live “webcast” for the princess’s funeral. The success of that coverage prompted an injection of extra cash for new servers and, when BBC News Online was launched formally later in the autumn, it had the capacity to stream the day’s main television news bulletins on a regular basis. The BBC’s other online services quickly adopted a similar multimedia style.
Birt subsequently claimed that producing video-on-demand had been his “obsession” all along. If so, the launch of the BBC iPlayer 10 years later marked the first real step towards what he’d seen as the ultimate destination of the digital revolution: the merging of TV, radio and the internet into a single platform.
The evolutionary origins of the BBC iPlayer can perhaps be discerned in a development of 1996, when programme-makers at Radio 1 created a virtual mixing desk that allowed anyone anywhere in the world to “listen again” to an archive of recent broadcasts. Six years later, a group of technologically adventurous BBC staff came up with the idea of creating something similar for TV. Ben Lavender, a young engineer in the BBC’s New Media Technology department, took up the challenge of turning what he called an “internet personal video recorder” into what became iPlayer.
The technological obstacles proved more straightforward to overcome than the political ones. Senior staff at the BBC needed lots of convincing: many of them refused to believe that anyone would ever want to watch TV on a computer screen or mobile phone. Once they were satisfied, regulators then demanded a “public value test”. This was the opportunity for commercial rivals to argue that the proposed new BBC service would damage their own interests. When it was finally launched to the public at Christmas 2007, the BBC’s original ambitions for iPlayer – which included sharing the platform with ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5, as well as including whole “box sets” of past TV series – had been drastically trimmed back.
Nevertheless, iPlayer brought the concept of catch-up TV to the British public. Here was something stable, easily navigated and gloriously free from advertising. By 2012, it was voted the UK’s number-one brand. As the chief executive of the streaming giant Netflix later admitted, if anything had “blazed the trail” for his own company’s success it was iPlayer. And together with BBC Online, iPlayer showed that – even in a media future dominated by the internet, always-on mobile phones and new social platforms – the BBC might retain a centre-stage role.
Alchemical advances
There was rarely a single “eureka” moment in this story of invention. Rather, a complex, almost alchemical mix of factors enabled the BBC to take its leading role: a depth and range of skill and experience on its payroll that allowed for what one insider called “nippy, smart people working around the edges trying things out”; the spending power that came with a licence fee still keeping pace with inflation; and, above all, a capacity for long-term thinking – and a tolerance of failure as a vital component of innovation – that contrasted with the private sector’s nervousness over untested, potentially unprofitable investments.
In this sense, the part played by the BBC in the digital revolution merely reflects its wider role over the past century. This is a role nurtured by those founding figures – John Reith and his lieutenants – who first set it on its path in 1922. For them, the BBC was never