London Calling: Streaming Media Europe Preview
How do the BBC iPlayer and Kangaroo fit together?
iPlayer is the BBC’s 7-day, free, on-demand catch-up service, whilst Kangaroo is a joint venture between BBC Worldwide, ITV, and Channel 4 to offer tens of thousands of hours of paid for or ad-funded programme content. Whereas iPlayer is about displaying content within the public service “window”—i.e., today 7 days after broadcast—Kangaroo is about making huge swathes of great content available on demand, including BBC archive material.
The two platforms are different but are definitely complementary. Ashley Highfield, the new CEO of Kangaroo, summed it up well when he was at the BBC—if iPlayer is like BBC1 through BBC4, then Kangaroo is like the UKTV channels, part of BBC Worldwide’s joint venture with Virgin Media.
Alec Hendry, MTV Networks UK & Ireland
Can you give our readers a brief description of your role at MTV Networks UK & Ireland?
As director of digital media operations and development for MTV Networks (MTVN) UK & Ireland, I sit within the digital media group, and look across all of the different platforms that consumers interact with us on, including online/websites, mobile services, interactive TV, and also broadcast TV, where we're working with SMS and interactive TV technologies.
How does streaming media and online (and/or mobile) video fit into MTV Networks’ focus and emphasis?
Our aim is to provide as much content as possible across all of the platforms we're currently working with. Broadcast television is obviously one of our main outlets, but we're also across the web and on mobile networks, and all of our research is showing that our core audience (16–24-year-olds in U.K./IE) is on all of these different platforms, continuously moving between all of them, and using all of them at the same time. So we try to ensure that we’re everywhere our consumers are—whether on our own property or others’, such as various social networks including Bebo or MySpace, and that our content is available on those sites to drive people back to TV, back to our own website (MTV.co.uk), and back to our mobile services.
How would you characterise or describe the split across all of your platforms mentioned above—websites, mobile services, interactive TV, and broadcast TV?
I don’t have direct figures as to the split between each of these, but sometimes we have the same audience across all four of these platforms, and on other occasions (or for other events and content), we have different audiences on different platforms.
Certainly at the moment we’re seeing that the web is one of our strongest platforms right along with broadcast television, and that the web is one of the primary digital opportunities for us.