Related Articles
BBC
The BBC wants to give you a say on how it spends your license fee on new and interesting ideas. BBC Taster is a new website where you can take a look at the experiments being tried by the BBC, then say which ones you like.
Projects present video or radio content from behind the scenes or the archives in interesting, interactive ways, or create new content and show it to you in a way that could only be enjoyed online. Each experimental project will hang around for around three months, during which time you can try it, share and rate it.
One project allows you to see the good stuff they can’t quite squeeze into programmes such as “The Culture Show”. As a kind of “deleted scenes” feature for BBC programmes, the project includes bite-sized clips of Lena Dunham and Jennifer Saunders chatting for a recent edition of “Newsnight”. The broadcast only used a small section of the interview, so the Taster website suggests a way you can access the rest of the fun stuff they didn’t have time for.
More from Auntie Beeb
- See what was on TV when you were born with BBC’s Genome project
- BBC Three to move entirely online on iPlayer
- BBC iPlayer gets a new look
- Enjoy BBC TV and radio shows on iPlayer for a whole month
- ‘Doctor Who’ coming to Paramount London theme park? Allons-y!
You can send travel guru Simon Reeves to different destinations with interactive videos, or follow poet Benjamin Zephaniah on a tour of the Turner exhibition at the Tate. Another project simply shows who’s turned up at the BBC today, giving you an idea of the range of interesting people appearing on TV and radio on any given day. There’s a “shuffle” mode for iPlayer based on what you’ve watched for and might like. And you can go backstage at a show by Run the Jewels, or take on the role of a soldier in the First World War, making decisions that affect the story.
Other projects mine the BBC vaults, with “Doctor Who” fan favourite character Commander Strax narrating a history of the show. Another project creates a personal timeline of significant events from the BBC news archives based on your date of birth. Or there’s a crowdsourced tagging project to listen to old BBC World Service radio programmes and add tags to help catalogue the archive.
Radio 1 listeners will be able to share their opinions with the station with a project called R1OT, which allows you to vote in polls by using hashtags on Twitter. In today’s presentation, the BBC gave as an example a poll in which listeners could vote for which DJ would present the Radio 1 Breakfast Show the following week — which would make R1OT a pretty big deal — but when I asked BBC staff they admitted it wouldn’t be used to make that kind of decision. Possible uses include voting for favourite artists or choosing which songs would be played.
28 new TV shows to geek out over in 2015 (pictures)
+25 more
