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- Article 9 of 34
- Televisual, July 1999
Fresh from the launch of BBC Knowledge, BBC Online's new commissioner is preparing for a millennial revamp for its site, as Rob Buckley discovers
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One of the first potential commissioning opportunities is the “major enhancement” of the site that Drori has promised to coincide with turn-of-the-century celebrations. “I don't want to give away exactly what we're going to do, because it will take away from the element of delicious surprise the audience will have when we tell them. But they're the kind of things you would expect from the really big, public-service, mega-corporation that we are.”
The BBC has received considerable criticism for dedicating so much of the licence fee (approximately 1%) to something perceived as a “male and up-market” preserve. So how does Drori square Online with the BBC's public-service commitment? “It's the kind of question we ask ourselves a lot. But the amount of money anyone now needs to get online, especially with free internet access as well as cheap computers, is pretty small. There's been a big shift in the demographic: it's going to become pretty ubiquitous.”
Access from public libraries and through electronic devices other than PCs, such as set-top boxes or even games consoles, will help. And to increase access for the disabled, Online is trialling a web-based sign-language project to see how much data is needed to produce good signs over the web (though those who can hear might expect the deaf to be able to read webpages without difficulty, “people who use sign language don't necessarily speak English”) and Betsie - BBC Education Text-toSpeech Internet Enhancer -a system that reads out webpages to the blind. A “magic moment” for Drori was when David Blunkett was able to use the system to soothe web.
In five years' time, however, Drori believes the very notion of online will be passe. “People won't even think of it as being online: it'll just be video on demand integrated with interactivity” - a view that places him at odds with broadcasters and online trailblazers before him, who have downplayed the likelihood of VOD taking off. And for the commissioner of BBC Online, the end of the segregation of the web from TV could mean just “a couple of geeky guys on the west coast of California” developing the web-specific content, while Online will be “everything in between...”
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