Last night's Online News Association meeting at the BBC was quite enlightening: bbc.co.uk/technology has been experimenting with producing bespoke on-demand video for the site, and working out exactly how it differs to TV reports.
The site borrowed producer Andrew Webb from BBC TV, who had to adapt his skills for the peculiarities of online video. Technology was obviously a sensible place for this trial, not least because the staff are likely to be the most willing to try stuff out, but Webb is now a permanent on-demand video producer because the trial is being seen as so successful.
Tech editor Darren Waters explained that technology is underserved when it comes to video coverage, so making their own reports allows them to do things like show and tells for Scratch, the "easy coding" tool, as well as longer interviews and more traditional packages. The Scratch video was linked to by a few key sites end on one day, generated 40% of all video traffic on the BBC site.
The aim was to make the technology coverage more joined up and also more useful to readers; some stories, like the easy coding tool, wouldn't work that well in text, so it was important to identify which stories video could add the most to.
The team used embedded Flash videos and experimented with different placement in and around the text coverage; videos at the top had the highest response, unsurprisingly, but also embedded Flash videos had a far higher viewer rate that videos in the pop-up media player. People need to be able to embed and share footage, said Waters.
The team also had "access" to Rory Cellan Jones, the BBC's technology correspondent, who was apparently quite willing to spend extra time producing a different version of the story for the web, and there were a few other mission objectives, like figuring out the best way to work with producers trained for TV. But the essence was in exploring new forms of video for the web, and how that differs to TV reports.
Webb's concerns were more practical: he had problems with the compatibility of programmes and had to learn new, more agile software that worked better for web video. He was uncertain of the requirements of online video, he said, and had to learn the different editorial requirements of the platform.
In conclusion, producing the video reports enhanced the site's editorial and pieces were often picked up for use on BBC 24 and BBC World, which meant more in-depth technology coverage being fed back to the TV. And the experiment added to a dialogue about new video production that can inform other departments, said Webb.
He said the project worked well because they were able to leverage resources from across the organisation.
The main point of caution seemed to be how time-consuming video production is, and that it is not feasible to expect one person to the the writer, presenter, cameraperson, fixer, sound guy and all the rest.
David Gyimah of Viewmagazine.tv disagreed, because he has developed a rather less methodical but hyper-efficient video-journalism technique that involves editing almost compiling the piece on the fly: for a three minute piece, he'd spend 20 minutes editing just five minutes of footage.
Not for the faint-hearted, but he's got it nailed. Needless to say he put together a piece on the meeting last night so we can expect that to emerge soon.
There's more of a write-up from former BBC tech editor Alf Hermida, who is now assistant professor of journalism at UBC in Vancouver.
