Michael Carrington is the Creative Director at BBC Children’s department.
BBC Children’s is a multi genre and multimedia department encompassing two of the most popular digital channels in the UK. Michael is specifically in charge of pan-platform commissioning across radio, television, on-line and interactive TV for the BBC’s young children’s brand, CBeebies which is targeting 0 to 6 year-old and the CBBC channel which targets 6 to 12 year-old. BBC Children broadcasts more than 200 hours of television per week whilst websites and interactive services are used by millions of children each week as well.

What are your strategies to encounter the future of broadcasting?
BBC recognizes the future of broadcasting is digital and on demand. And that’s what we’re heading towards. The BBC’s ambition is to be the most creative organisation in the world. To achieve this ambition, we’ve come up with a new creative strategy which we call «creative future» and now we must come up with new ways of working to deliver that strategy. In the Children’s department, we’re moving toward our digital platforms using the CBeebies and CBBC brands. For young children (CBeebies brand) this means more focus on interaction and play; for older children connecting with CBBC, our website leads the way with a real connection to the television content and an emphasis on using generated content. So for example at CBeebies, we’ve already started the process and our content is available on television, on radio and online and also on interactive TV, through the red button on remote control, which is similar in style to CD-rom experience. There is game, karaoke and other customized examples. A joined up approach internally becomes more vital than ever. So our television, online and inter-Broadcasters Going Online: BBC active teams are being integrated that means that they are all sitting together in the same space and this is to ensure cross-pollenisation of ideas and to ensure that the development process has a genuine flow. Not every idea will be 360 degrees, but we want to be sure that when it is appropriate all the thinking happens early on.

What is the situation in UK regarding digital technologies?
In the UK, digital TV is now in over 80% of house-holds, that’s over 60 million homes. We’re answering our on demand services. First of all we’re proposing a seven days catch up radio and television service, live streaming of our television channels and separately a pilot where our audience will have access to our complete archive, which is called «open archive». We are also building a rich search engine in partnership with IBM to better connect with our audiences. The idea is that the system being developed with IBM called «marvel» will deliver not just text based responses but massive relevant images and videos when the content is searched. And our strategy is also to connect with and to involve our audience not just by providing one way called «Ketnet Kick». The CBBC’s version will be a community for children to create content in a collaborative way and have the opportunity to get their work published online on interactive TV, on mobiles and on the CBBC’s channel. It’s an immersive world not unlike «second Life».

What about launching broadband content like a TV series or an animated series online then migrating it over to TV afterwards?
Under the BBC’s charter, we can’t just take a TV programme and launch it online. We have to have a terrestrial or digital broadcast first. But we are creating characters on the website that are specifically for the website. One was «Tommy Zoom» which became very popular for 4 - 6 year olds. I have now commissioned him to become his own TV show. So content created on the web is starting to become known and popular and transferring over to TV. It’s a very exciting opportunity. We are experimenting on the web with streaming our content but we have to have a license for it to be able to do it and that is under review at the moment.

Do you envisage developing content for mobile area?
It’s difficult for the BBC as we are a trusted brand and therefore seen as a safe environment. Mobile phones in the eyes of parents are evil nasty things so we have to be careful about how we use mobile devices. We have experimented with downloadable ring-tones and images. But they are usually for older children. We don’t have any experience with the very young end of that audience yet. Mobile phones have a large penetration in the UK and six year olds and up own mobile phones. There is no substantial use below six, more a mother giving a phone to keep a kid quiet in the supermarket but not enough to mean that we would create content specifically for it.

Televisions are launching a 7-day catch up service for all their content. What can or can’t the BBC do with this service?
It comes back to who owns the rights and who is prepared to pay for the rights. We have a proposal in front of the BBC trust to provide a catch up service for all of our content and really it just means that once you have transmitted an episode on air that for 7 days afterwards you are able to download that episode from home on the Internet. And it will either expire after 7 days or be destroyed in some kind of explosive way! All of our content will be available.
We are already doing it with our audio content on radio online. You can download, fast forward or download it to your Ipod or other mechanism. Information and content. They can be proactive by voting for what they like and don’t like. They can comment on our programmes or they could make recommendation to others, in the same way you would recommend a book on aMaZON. The BBC plans to be available wherever and whenever the audience wants it. The idea being to raise the profile of the BBC linear channel as well as the programme content and the on and off screen talent therefore reaching the often hard to reach community and giving existing audiences a deeper programme experience.
Of course we don’t have all the answers. We’re still unsure of how fast the audience will want to change but knowing that the market is constantly developing and changing there’s likely to be a lot of interest and liking initially but how long will that be sustained?

What kind of challenges are you facing?
Our biggest challenge is to sort out the rights situation, that’s in order to make our content fully on demand. We’re in discussion with all the relevant rights owners. So when we’ll have sorted out what we can do on TV, there is still a question mark over what we can do online and interactively. And of course there is the role of the PC as home entertainment medium. It’s still not central to family life but we’re very keen to experiment.

What kind of experiment did you already make?
We recently launched a series called «Level Up». It’s a live action show, conceived as a brand that could help children get the most of growing up. We adopted a gaming interface. That’s the link to the audience. This was based on the insight that 100% of our audiences are gamers. «Level Up» was commissioned for TV, web and mobile and incorporated emergent technologies, such as blogs, webcams, wap and broadband players. Right from the beginning we wanted our platforms to rely on each other. Specifically the website provided most of our contributors and ideas for our films as well as high percentage of studio content. In turn we used TV to drive the audience to the web and mobile. Within three months of launch, «Level Up» had 40% of all messages or traffic of CBBC’s website and 8 million pages impression per month. We adopted Skype webcam technologies to get children onscreen from their bedrooms. They were live on television.

Do you have other projects in store?
One of the key projects that’s being developed is a proven media concept currently run successfully on VRT, the Belgium Flemish broadcaster, these rights are not the Holy Grail; they are not going to plug your deficit to make an animated feature because the money just doesn’t exist at the moment. I think we are in that transition period where other funding models are available but they are just not substantial at the moment. But we should be providing content that our viewers want and they want it now and on demand.
We as a broadcaster want to be everywhere in the same way that people who produce programmes want to be everywhere and as a public service broadcaster everywhere means that it is available free. So it is a question of juggling exploiting rights for a financial gain which the independent producer would want to do and us a public service broadcaster providing content as part of our charter.

What kind of participation do children have on the BBC websites? How many do something?
In terms of the BBC website, we have 80 .000 hits a day. They are playing games, they are communicating with each other, they are responding to our content, telling us what they like and what they don’t like.
So it’s quite a significant number of children inter- acting with the website each day. And it’s about the richness of the content that excites them and so our job is to provide that. If we don’t provide that content then they don’t use it. But at the moment they seem to really enjoy it and it’s like a club, they feel they are part of it. The more they feel that it is a community, the more they participate. We have a lot of returning kids who actively participate on the site every day. They could be connecting with our current affairs programme «Newsround», providing stories, connecting with our magazine show «Blue Peter» in helping to raise money for a charity or simply playing games on the «secret show» website. Our audience is very active in connecting with us, they are very happy to tell us what they like and don’t like.

Cartoon Master Murcia, Spain, March 2007