It’s all gone viral

According to a BBC survey, viral clips online are cutting into the time ‘young people’ would have spent watching television. To be honest though, we didn’t need a survey to tell us that. The fact that a video of a fat kid swinging a broom about has been watched 900 million times tells us all we need to know.

The basic point of the survey was to find out if people watch less television as a result of watching online video clips. The headline across news websites is that more people are watching less tv if they watch more than one viral clip a week.

The BBC has says in their news online report “Some 43% of Britons who watch video from the internet or on a mobile device at least once a week said they watched less normal TV as a result.”

What that doesn’t tell you, but the graph on the same report does is that 54% of people watching at least one viral clip a week don’t watch any less television as a result.

What was much more interesting was the breakdown of percentage viral watching by age group. Obviously the largest group was the 16-24 year olds. Around 28% of that group watch viral video at least once a week.

Also, unsuprisingly was that the percentage dropped the further up the age scale you got. Until the last two that is. More people in the 65+ age group watch viral videos than those aged 55-65.

The viral virus has been catching on to such an incredible extent that, as well as producing their own viral masterpieces, TV companies are trying to pull the viral stars into their marketplace.

We saw recently the big Newsnight push for people to create their own reports and post them to YouTube et al, then recently the BBC announced that News 24 would have an all UGC show.

You News launched on November 25 and is apparently the first news programme where all the content is generated by members of the public. It draws on the 10 thousand+ emails the BBC gets every day with stories, features and video clips.

The controller of BBC News 24,Kevin Bakhurst said “Your News will make use of the huge range of material being sent into the BBC by the public, some of which has already provided real newsgathering value.

“Your News will reflect the stories catching our audience’s eye and talking to them directly about the issues they feel really matter.”

The programme goes out every Saturday at 03:30 and 15:30 and Sundays at 10:30 and 23:30 throughout December. All clips will be credited on air.

Call me an old synic but this does feel a bit like a more serious version of ‘You’ve Been Framed’ doesn’t it? Instead of people kicking cats, children falling into a paddling pool or wedding dresses being torn off by a wayward small child we have people giving thoughts and opinions on issues that matter to them.

Obviously it’s a MUCH better use of the medium but it really isn’t THAT new. I’m not sure that trying to solve the problem of people watching the web instead of TV by putting web like content on the TV is going to help either.

Ricky Gervais, the first person any media outlet turns to for comment on web media since his record breaking podcast said: “You can’t knock up an episode of The Sopranos or 24 on a little handheld digital camera.”

He also went on to talk about how he does think TV companies will embrace the new media and something about people not having tellies when the BBC launched. I can see the point he was making but I’m not sure it’s completely relevant to this situation.

However he does get it right with the Sopranos and 24 comment. I think this move to put web on TV is going in the wrong direction. Instead of trying to put the things people watch online on their television in the hope they will watch it their instead - tv companies should be pushing the concept of TV on the web harder.

I know Channel 4 are going head first with 4oD, the BBC are launching the iPlayer and already have a load of shows and clips through the BBC TWO website but this should be universal.

TV companies should be ‘doing a YouTube’ and making things easily, quickly and hassle free for consumers who just want to watch an interesting clip.

The iPlayer and 4oD are great concepts but they target something different to the YouTube audience.

The people tuning into YouTube in their millions and not watching as much TV (the people this survey is bleeting on about) are, in the most part, just looking for something original, quick and interesting.

The BBC TWO website gets this aspect almost right. It makes a variety of clips available from a variety of shows as well as extended bits. The BBC Regional TV Broadband trial is pretty close too - it makes every report from every bulletin available as seperate clips.

The problem with this though is it all lacks the two most important aspects of the YouTube success. Community and distribution. OK so the BBC TWO website lets you send an e-mail to a friend with a clip in but that’s not what I’m talking about.

For the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and all the others to really capture that audience and pull them in they need to provide people with a line of code that lets them put the clips from … say Top Gear … on their own website, blog, message board or whatever comes next.

They need to open comments, voting and debate on every single clip - turn the video of the ‘faith race’ from Top Gear into a community all of it’s own. People can leave comments on it’s page, see related clips down the side, rate the clips and easily put it, in a flash script on their own website.

So instead of TV companies pushing for people to move back to watching TV by putting their favourite web clips on the box - move your content on to the web in an easy to use, easy to share format.

Also by offering it themselves it would probably stop people posting the same clips to YouTube or Google Video and show the fact that it was originally created by the BBC because the BBC logo would appear on the corner of the flash window on every site the clip appeared.

Check out the BBC’s Future of TV section for a great roundup.

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