At a London meet-up of the Online News Association in July 2007, Darren Waters, technology editor of the BBC News website, set out what the corporation had learned from a pilot project in on-demand video. The trial began that January with an on-demand video producer, Andrew Webb, embedded in the site’s technology section, and the television reporter Rory Cellan-Jones briefed to work across platforms.
Webb called the production side “bamboozling”: at one point he was using 15 different pieces of software, and a task that had taken four hours came down to 30 minutes.
The editorial question was which kind of video worked alongside an online story rather than repeating it — a point Pete Clifton, head of BBC News Interactive, made at the Future of News conference the same week. Short show-and-tell pieces did well: three on aspects of Microsoft Vista together drew more than 400,000 page views. Halfway through, the trial moved from Real and Windows Media files to Flash video embedded in the story, and placement turned out to matter — video at the top of a page drew far more clicks than video further down. A clip demonstrating software built at MIT Labs took 40 per cent of all video watched that day, which Waters put down to it showing what the text could not.
His conclusions were that the demand was clear, that 85 per cent of users said they would watch more Flash video, and that television reporters could be re-educated for an on-demand audience. The project was extended past its planned end.