With the knowledge that audiences want to consumer news content in a variety of ways, the BBC works to make that user experience as seamless as possible and have developed a “Four Screens Strategy” to seamlessly bridge desktop, mobile, tablet and connected TV devices in a way that works for the BBC and its partners.
TVA Plus: What has research revealed that prompted the necessity of the Four Screens Strategy?
What research has shown us is that our audience wants access to our content in a flexible way that fits in with their busy lives and users appreciate seamless transitions between platforms.
We’ve also found that people who use our content across multiple platforms have higher rates of engagement. Audiences have also shown they want content that is appropriate for specific platforms, such as shorter content for mobile and more in-depth output for television audiences, when viewers have more time to watch longer news stories.
TVA Plus: How has this strategy worked for you in terms growing your audiences and news consumption via the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th screen?
The BBC’s four screens strategy works to seamlessly bridge desktop, mobile, tablet and connected TV devices. We believe that not all content should be available on all platforms in the same way and we are taking advantage of the unique characteristics of each platform and device to create relevant experiences with consistent design responsive to each screen.
And it’s working. The number of people accessing BBC News on mobiles and tablets has tripled in the last year. In an average week, 9.7 million users worldwide use these devices to access our news. This represents about 26% of total our digital reach. What’s interesting though is that TV audiences have sustained alongside the new platform growth. The appetite for news as a genre therefore is increasing.
TV Asia Plus: What are your concerns about the news genre having to keep up with a technology-savvy/ hungry audience? How does the implementation of a Four Screens Strategy on the BBC compare with that of entertainment and/ or infotainment channels?
Our audience is both technologysavvy and eager to consume our content, which provides an incredible opportunity for us. But innovation doesn’t come without difficult choices. We have teams across the world gathering and producing multiplatform news content. Those resources, coupled with the fact that people trust the BBC, give us a competitive advantage – but it’s expensive. That high fixed cost means we need to generate revenues internationally to return a profit at the end of the year and enable reinvestment back into producing high quality journalism.
And the inherent nature of news means that, unlike most other media, news content has little lasting financial value. This may seem harsh to say, but genres like drama or comedy, can be resold or reversioned over and over again. With news however, there’s no ‘long tail’, although search and archive do provide some longer term opportunities.
We need to exploit our content to its fullest potential in real-time. People have an inherent need to know what’s going on in the world and they want to find out now, which is why it’s important for us to make content available in ways that work both for us and our distribution partners around the world.
