The BBC's fledgling RAD department - or rapid application development project - has revealed another of its very early stage, prototype working models, this time exploring how to construct a video show designed, from the outset, to be published, pulled apart and shared on the web.
It's not dissimilar to what used to be called 360-programming commissions at the BBC and other broadcasters, where shows would be designed with web versions in mind. But the RAD project is much more techie and structured both editorially and technologically for that audience.
RAD, led by portfolio manager George Wright, looked to various other BBC departments for advice on this, including Vision and with heavy involvement from Ian Forrester at Backstage.
Firstly, the subject of the show - called R&DTV - is about web-based technology. The first episode includes Nicholas Negroponte, founder of One Laptop Per Child, Kevin Rose from Digg and some of the BBC team behind the BBC Micro. Though it's not produced to the high-budget standards of BBC TV, it's definitely not filmed on Flip cameras with bad audio. It's well-thought out, web-friendly subject matter and filmed in HD quality by Rain Ashford and Hemmy Cho from Backstage.
More importantly, the team wanted to explore how the production and post-production process would be different when building a film designed to be taken apart. R&DTV has been produced in two versions; one five-minute and one 30-minute.
Filming their own content from the outset meant they could use a suitable rights framework, rather than trying to adapt existing footage. They included the open .ogg video standard and established all material under a free, non-commercial Creative Commons attribution licence. Editorially, they learnt early on not to use music or any soundtrack that would make a re-edit too hard. One of their interviewees was showing a Disney clip for an internal demo they had recorded, and that was another rights-related issue that had to be dealt with.
Episode 1 is online now. The longer, 30-minute version provides more material for those who want to cut and re-use footage for their own video, but crucially every element of the show's assets in one bundle - at least 27 different elements including the full-length interviews in different video file formats including Quicktime, Flash and Ogg, audio, logos and also metadata files.
The project idea came up in December, and they started building it a month ago.
"These trials are to learn what from people do with this stuff," said Wright, who has explained the project on the RAD blog. "We've already learnt that rights are even more complicated than you think, even if you're starting from scratch. Video codecs are also very complex, and distributing large files over the internet legally and in a quality assured way is still very difficult, especially when you're wokring in a distributed way."
Wright aid they could have made distribution easier (especially because Forrester works from Manchester and Wright from London) by using lower-quality files if they had filmed on lower-sec equipment, but that they didn't want a consumer "internetty" feel. "If they want, they can downgrade the footage for an iPhone or web tablet, but you can't upgrade footage."
"If we have a good idea, Erik Huggers and Matthew Postgate let us get on with it," said Wright. "We have this space to do this kind of work as an important part of our day jobs."
The next episode is due in early May. Though this is just a very early stage prototype and not a roadmap for the BBC's future production strategy, it's an interesting experiment in constructing projects in a more web friendly, distributable way - a very interesting, and web literate approach that could and should be used more often by traditional media firms struggling to keep control of their content once they release it online. In this format, everyone wins.
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