As with many inventions, the story of how BBC Online and BBC iPlayer came to be launched is not really about the work of one remarkable genius or one single moment of revelation. It’s a tangled tale, with a cast of hundreds and involving a multitude of creative decisions. And although it’s a tale that involves failures as well as successes, it also shows that it’s sometimes large and long-established public organisations, rather than their smaller, younger commercial competitors, which are in the best position to turn advanced technology into an everyday resource for millions.
To trace the origins of BBC Online, we need to go back to the 1980s, when BBC Education launched a remarkable computer literacy project. A small group of programme-makers working away in this BBC department saw how helpful it would be if viewers at home who joined in had access to an affordable and easy-to-use personal computer. This was the moment when the famous BBC Micro was born through a collaboration between the BBC’s own in-house Research and Development team and scientists at the Acorn company.
The computer literacy project wrapped around the BBC Micro provided the template for an attempt in 1994 to get viewers connecting to the World Wide Web. The producers behind this latest TV series, The Net, were keen to establish a dialogue with viewers while the programmes were still on air. They set up bulletin boards, placed an email address in the closing credits and even planned a ‘user’s club’.
By this stage, one of the BBC’s most internet-savvy engineers, Brandon Butterworth, had also built an internal network behind-the-scenes, linking desktop computers across different production departments. This meant that the BBC’s own staff were starting to embrace the idea of ‘connecting’ online, at exactly the same time as programmes such as The Net, and the BBC Networking Club which was set-up to accompany it, were helping the public to access the as-yet unfamiliar terrain of the Internet.
The story of this crucial moment in the BBC’s digital revolution is told in this short archive clip, featuring George Auckland, Jemima Kiss, Bill Thompson and Brandon Butterworth:
As those interviews suggest, by the mid-1990s staff in lots of different corners of the BBC had started to explore the Internet. Soon hundreds of web-pages were being created – a site for the Hungarian Service, a fan-page called Trumptonshire Web, a message board for football fans over at Five Live.
It was, though, all a bit ad hoc. And by 1997, the Director-General, John Birt, was keen to create something bigger and more organised. He explains his thinking in this interview from the BBC Oral History archive:
It was now that the BBC’s journalists seized the initiative. In August 1997, a ‘rolling news’ website was very quickly created in response to the death of Princess Diana, complete with video and audio extracts from the BBC’s existing TV and radio services. But even before that dramatic moment, a site with some 8,000 pages had been created by the Corporation’s journalists as part of their coverage of the May General Election. Bella Hurrell, an editor in BBC News at the time, recalled 1997 as a crucial turning-point in the BBC’s attempts to popularize the use of the Internet:
It was in 1997, too, that John Birt travelled to the United States to visit Microsoft and some of the emerging new technology companies, such as Geocities, Netscape, and Progressive Networks. He realised theywere starting to take notice of the BBC’s web presence. As he saw it, his task now as Director-General was to persuade staff throughout the Corporation - many of whom, including the Chairman of the Governors, still thought of their core business as being radio or television - to throw their support behind large-scale investment in what looked like being a brand new medium altogether:
For Birt, and the management team he’d assembled in his Policy and Planning unit, it was important that, even now, the Corporation had a long-term vision of what BBC Online could become and where it would fit in with the BBC’s wider public service mission.
One of the key figures involved in shaping this vision was Ed Richards, then the Controller of Corporate Strategy. In this recording of a ‘witness seminar’, now archived as part of the BBC’s Oral History collection, Richards reveals what he and his team were busy imagining behind-the-scenes during those closing years of the 1990s:
"What that vision was, was about a world in essence where the viewer was completely in control, he or she could choose what they wanted on a programme, or item by item basis, it was pure on demand world and that the BBC services would have to be presented and available in a form that enabled, over any distribution mechanism and in essentially non-linear as well as linear forms, the viewer could exercise that judgement. And that the journey was to an endpoint that looked like that. The character of the journey, the nature of the journey, of course featured an evolution from existing linear channels, putting those on different distribution mechanisms and then migrating to probably the world we haven’t even yet reached, which was a pure on demand world in which we imagined linear channels may not even exist anymore. And we didn’t know when that would happen or if that would happen, and indeedit hasn’t quite yet happened. But it enabled us to develop a plan and a strategy which said, well let’s go with the flow of that, we know in some form or another that’s where we’ll end up, let’s plot the BBC services in that context."
— Ed Richards interviewed by Lucy Hooberman, 2015. Witness Seminar, BBC Oral History Collection.
According to John Birt, this ability to develop a strategy which might pay dividends in the long-run, rather than needing to make a quick returns, was key to the BBC’s success with Online. It reflected an institutional capacity to both ‘think big’ and absorb all those unpredictable changes of direction that suddenly arise when it comes to technological innovation:
During his term as Director General, John Birt had watched over a BBC in which Online was starting to be seen as a third medium in its own right, standing alongside the two older media of television and radio. But it was under his successor, Greg Dyke, that the BBC finally achieved for its viewers and listeners what Ed Richards and his team had set as their end-goal: an ‘on demand world’ that would melt the boundaries between different media - and challenge the supremacy of the traditional broadcast schedule.
The iPlayer was unveiled to the public on Christmas Day, 2007. It had had a difficult gestation lasting more than five years. Lots of managers at the BBC remained naturally fearful of any new and untested technology which threatened to be a drain on their own resources. And the BBC was not allowed to launch any new service without approval from the government.
But, as with Online, a great deal of the momentum for what would later be called the iPlayer had come from below.
In one part of the BBC, Tony Ageh, Robin Price and Bill Thompson had together come up with the seemingly simple concept of allowing people to access BBC Three’s programmes using their personal computers. Their initial proposal was for something called ‘3VO – BBC Three’s streaming video on demand service’. The BBC Radio Player already did something similar for audio. The challenge now was to create something similar for television.
The man who took up this challenge was Ben Lavender, a young engineer in the BBC’s New Media Technology department. He’d already worked-up detailed plans for what he called an Internet Personal Video Recorder – or, rather more romantically, a ‘time machine’:
A working prototype of iPlayer had been created as early as November 2003. But it took more than two more years – and endless staff presentations – before Greg Dyke’s successor, Mark Thompson, gave the go ahead for what he called MyBBCPlayer, subject to ‘all necessary consents’ from the government and the BBC’s own Governors.
Tony Ageh and Ben Lavender had originally hoped that their new platform would include programmes from ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 as well as the BBC’s own. But what emerged in 2007 was something rather more restricted: limited to carrying only BBC material, and, after intense lobbying from commercial rivals, programme availability restricted to a mere seven days.
Even so, iPlayer was free. And it was easy to use. As one newspaper put it, the BBC had shown how ‘it should be done... glossy, navigable and without too much fiddling around’. Before long, a third of the country’s entire internet capacity was taken up by people using iPlayer. By March 2012 it had been voted the UK’s number one brand. That same year, the BBC’s coverage of the London Olympics was more extensive than ever, thanks largely to the combined effect of Online and iPlayer.
It was in 2012, too, that the US Company Netflix arrived in Britain. Well-resourced and free from the regulation which prevented the BBC from developing iPlayer to its full potential, the American company was able over the next few years to grow its share of the UK audience for on-demand video; the BBC’s, meanwhile, fell from 40 per cent to 15 per cent.
This did not stop Netflix’s Chief Executive from acknowledging the debt he owed when it came to the public embrace of box-set binging. ‘The iPlayer’, he said, ‘really blazed the trail’.
He was surely right. In an organisation more tightly managed and market conscious than ever, looking to the future had sometimes been seen as wasteful effort. But, in the end, it was the BBC that had taken on the large-scale risks in developing new and unfamiliar technology from which most commercial companies in Britain had initially recoiled and which would play such a large role in building ‘Digital Britain’.
It was this organisational ability to be liberated from short-term thinking that struck many insiders as the biggest lesson of all to be learned from the BBC’s digital revolution – as we can hear in this extract from the BBC Oral History collection. In this brief clip, three key figures in the Corporation’s Policy and Planning Unit - Robin Foster, Jeremy Oliver and Jamie Reeve – reflect on the longer-term implications of that extraordinary moment in time:
"My thought is that we shouldn’t underestimate the nature of the BBC, its institutional form, and its form of funding as a way of underpinning the sort of approach we’ve been talking about and the capacity for trying new things, for innovating and for taking risks. Which some commercial companies, especially established commercial broadcasters would have found much more difficult to do, and I think if you turn that around it is a good case for public funding of this sort of enterprise, it does allow much more flexibility and much more freedom to do those sorts of things. It has its downsides of course as well, and one point I would add would be that although I agree with Ed and others about the importance of a consumer focus, the risk of that is that if it’s not thought about in a careful enough way it leads an organisation like the BBC just to do lots of things. And I think pulling that back to say, ‘What’s the BBC really all about’, is quite a key factor in all of this."
— Robin Foster interviewed by Lucy Hooberman, 2015. Witness Seminar, BBC Oral History Collection.
"I think I would like to second the point about the balance between the responsibility the corporate centre had and that of the mass of the BBC. Because there may have been a framework and some forward looking thinking, but the fact was that the reason why the things are great was because of the extraordinary population of creative people who are ready to look out and take advantage of the new space. And that was something, again, that may follow partly form the method of funding but it’s also from the nature of the BBC as an institution. So there was a framework but there was also this extraordinary fervent and hardworking population who actually did it, and were part of what made if innovative and successful."
— Jeremy Oliver interviewed by Lucy Hooberman, 2015. Witness Seminar, BBC Oral History Collection.
"I’ve got a couple of observations, one about the BBC and one of them a more personal one. I think one of the interesting things, on reflection, about the BBC is that it was the non-commercial broadcaster internet he landscape who was able to take more risk, for some of the reasons we’ve all talked about, but actually I think that’s slightly counterintuitive and very, very important for peoplepolicy and sustaining the BBC. That our ruthlessly commercial competitors failed here and we didn’t fail, and there’s a really important lesson to learn from that and John’s leadership was very important but I do think the ability to take risk was not to be underestimated. And from a personal level I feel incredibly privileged, I think it’s probably the historian in me talking, I feel incredibly privileged to have been able to witness at a macro level, at a corporate level and a personal level, a revolution going on, upfront, very, very close and I still am excited by it. I was excited by it in 1995, I still find it the most unbelievable source of inspiration, I think it is one of the great developments that humankind has ever seen."
— Jamie Reeve interviewed by Lucy Hooberman, 2015. Witness Seminar, BBC Oral History Collection.
Written by David Hendy, Emeritus Professor, University of Sussex, author of The BBC: A People’s History.