BBC asks Big Brother's maker to create online TV
The BBC has commissioned Endemol to create an ambitious interactive online show that aims to tap the youth audience that is increasingly turning away from TV.
Ashley Highfield, the BBC's director of future media and technology, described the show, to be called Signs of Life, as the BBC's "most ambitious internet format to date".
Speaking at the Broadcasting Press Guild lunch he said, "The internet is a new creative medium but original content ideas are still thin on the ground."
He added that the £800,000 budget for the series, which consists of eight 20-minute episodes, is a comparable budget to a typical TV drama.
The show, which aims to target the key, late-teenage demographic that is declining on the BBC's broadcast channels, will be set in a village in Suffolk where "strange things happen".
Mr Highfield described it as like "Buffy meets horoscopes".
While the 20-minute episodes will be viewable as a story in their own right, the idea is for the show to be "wrapped in interactivity" to make it a multi-media experience.
Viewers can also interact with various objects online - but not during the programme - that build up a "psychological profile" of the user.
The profile, based on the behaviour-choices viewers make, can be exported, for example to a MySpace page, through a piece of technology Mr Highfield called a "widget".
He stressed that the online show was not a primitive "choose the ending" style experience.
"The web is not just a way of getting TV out. We need to rethink the idea that if something is successful it goes to BBC One. We need to perhaps think that something is successful if it is a success on YouTube."
Mr Highfield added that there was a "danger" in starting a new commission as a linear TV show because it then "sinks or swims" on its overnight ratings. "We want to go beyond that," he said.
"It is important to start [the commissioning process] from the other end [not as a straight TV show] otherwise everything ends out 30-minute shaped."
guardian
