ENTRIES TAGGED "bbc"

Cultural capital goes commercial

Mobile retail access is a vital part of an overarching brand experience

It wasn’t one of my proudest moments when, a week before Christmas last year, I was hunched over my smartphone towards the back of the famous Hamley’s Toy Store on London’s Regent Street, composure tethered to an elusive bar of 3G network. The thing was, that bar had been easier to find in-store than the toy I planned on presenting my nephew with for Christmas. When I placed my order on Amazon with a plethora of merchandise within arm’s length, a nagging sense of irony did not escape me – nor did a whole new understanding of retail pain points. To be fair, Christmas shopping in a metropolitan area probably blasts through higher-than-average pain thresholds.

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Perceptive Media: Undoing the limitations of traditional media

The BBC R&D department's Ian Forrester talks about the broadcast company's Perceptive Media experiment.

Recent research indicates a clear desire for interactive engagement in storytelling on the part of audiences. Researchers at the BBC are pioneering the concept of engagement and content personalization with their Perceptive Media experiment. The Next Web’s managing editor Martin Bryant took a look at Perceptive Media and its first incarnation Breaking Out earlier this summer. He describes the experiment’s concept:

“Essentially, it’s media — either video or audio — that adapts itself based on information it knows about individual viewers. So, if you were watching a game show that you’d never seen before, it might show you an explanation of the rules in detail, while regular views are shown bonus, behind-the-scenes footage instead. … Other smart ideas behind Perceptive Media include the idea that TV hardware could automatically recognize who was watching and tailor the content of TV to them automatically.”

I reached out to BBC R&D researcher Ian Forrester to find out more about Perceptive Media and the potential for the concept. Our interview follows. Forrester will further discuss the Perceptive Media experiment and its potential applications at TOC Frankfurt Conference on October 9, 2012.

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BBC Shifts Conversation Style: Go Where They're Already Talking

I think this deserves to be pondered. BBC News is moving away from merely hosting comments to inciting discussion in a variety of formats and locations. From Reportr.net: For the US presidential debates, it [the BBC] has opened channels on video services Qik, 12Seconds and Phreadz. Some of the videos were subsequently edited and posted on the BBC News…