For many years, I – like many others – despised the audio and visual aspects of the BBC website which relied primarily on the dreaded Real format. This required me to install a media player which was effectively a glorified piece of adware and more frequently than not, my web browser would crash when I actually tried to play it!
When the BBC released iPlayer, I was pleasantly surprised to see Flash (a relatively universal format) being used (in addition to WMV, unfortunately, for downloads). Whilst some may advocate the use of a format such as Ogg over this, I believe Flash was a better choice as for the average internet user, it was more accessible and the web browser plug-ins are more stable.
BBC’s choice of utilising Adobe AIR for their Linux and Mac iPlayer applications was also very interesting. Once again, I felt wary of the BBC relying on a propietary runtime environment as opposed to simply compiling their own applications as standard binaries for the operating systems. Practicability was probably the issue as AIR allowed FLV etc to be integrated with ease and smoothly and the BBC also realised that AIR is quite cross-platform (since the release of a version for Linux) and now quite accepted. Whilst an open-source solution in many ways would be ideal, it is impossible as the BBC demand to use DRM, something which could no doubt be hacked with ease if the sourcecode were public.
The BBC News website has been very good for a long time. Unlike many news websites, redesigns and the style of URL has not rendered many articles dead. I think the BBC are clever in keeping stories from a period in that period’s design; it ensures compatibility, gives a reflection of the era and prevents confusion (for example, based on the design alone, anyone can tell this article is no longer accurate). Their news website is also remarkably usable when compared to those of their competitors; it has clearly defined but small and accurate categories (’Africa’ has its own category, as opposed to just being ‘World News’), there’s a clear navigation system and there isn’t an excessive amount of pictures or videos.
Many people behind-the-scenes at the BBC now maintain high quality blogs which add depth to reporting. Whilst the ever-so-neutral Daily Mail criticises these ‘Leftist’ blogs , lots of it is just commentary, explanations for views which may have been inferred and information about working at the BBC. The effect is that the organisation becomes more human as opposed to a vast inhuman public broadcaster. They are attempting to reach as much of their audience as they can, maintaining a Welsh language blog!
The BBC seems to have realised what their audience wants and instead of having an inaccessible website, they’ve embraced Web 2.0 and made the media seem more human and their webpages significantly more user-friendly.
