Anthony Rose was not a happy man. In December 2007, which was less than a month away, the British Broadcasting Corporation was due to debut the iPlayer, its highly anticipated video-on-demand service. And, despite the years of work on the project, it simply wasn't good enough.
Rose, who had arrived three months earlier as the iPlayer's latest boss, thought that users would find the service too difficult to use. But first he had to make his case to the BBC's tired Future Media & Technology team. So, pulling a chair up to a computer, he asked his assistant to find her favourite BBC show, Friday Night with Jonathan Ross. "It was a disaster," Rose recalls. "It went wrong in ways we couldn't even imagine."
First, she clicked links that didn't go anywhere. She couldn't return to the main page. And the search didn't work properly.
Finally, when she did find the page, it had no guest information, meaning that she couldn't be sure whether she'd already seen that episode. Rose sat back. The rest of the iPlayer team looked at each other. Maybe they should listen to what this guy had to say.
Rose's philosophy on the iPlayer, which allows audiences in the UK to watch and listen to programmes online up to seven days after their initial broadcast, is simple: "It has to appeal to Mrs Smith, aged 65, who just wants to watch EastEnders, as well as the Twitterati," he says.
In other words, everyone.
In terms of audience behaviour, the iPlayer has redefined television and how we view it. It accounts for seven to ten per cent of the UK's total online traffic - and reached 20 per cent during the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Last December, the BBC had 41 million requests to view programmes using the service.
"It seems every generation has a media revolution," Greg Dyke, then BBC director general, said in a speech in 2003. "For my mother, it was radio; for me, it was television; and for my children, it's digital." The BBC has often been seen as more than a broadcaster. At various points in its long history (it is 82 years old in October), the corporation has been an innovator in both content and engineering.
Who do think you are?
Dyke had asked the then 34-year-old Ashley Highfield to head the BBC's New Media & Technology group (later to be called Future Media and Technology) in 2000. Even with his experience at NBC Europe and Flextech, Highfield was a surprising choice - he was, at the time, the youngest ever member of the BBC's executive board. It was clear the media landscape was changing but this was in the days before YouTube, BitTorrent and iTunes. Dyke later acknowledged the "second phase of the digital revolution", which put public money behind digital distribution, but no one knew which way it would go.
When Highfield arrived, the BBC's website was not even in the UK's ten most-viewed.
"I wanted to prepare the BBC for the digital age and keep it relevant," says Highfield, the man now most likely to be credited by broadcasting historians with bringing the corporation into the 21st century.
An engineer and business-school-trained management consultant, Highfield had run interactive services at Flextech, the pay-TV operator that is now part of Virgin Media. He understood that pushing the BBC online meant passing control from the bosses to the users. This was considered radical, almost heresy, to insiders used to a world where the only editorial viewpoint was the BBC's. "I was trying to create centres of excellence and stitch it together, as it was basically a set of feudal fiefdoms," Highfield says.
He began modestly. Projects included a celebrity stock exchange, Celebdaq, and h2g2, a Douglas Adams fansite that he brought out of liquidation in 2001. Yet his stock rose rapidly as his division expanded. His budget doubled in his first year to just over £100 million in 2001. By 2006, his resources had surged to £400 million.
In 2004, the BBC finally bet the bank on Highfield. It announced that it was developing an interactive media player and that trials would be completed by December 2005. The BBC, it declared, would make its "content available to audiences when and where they want it". The BBC would be on demand. The future that Highfield had promised seemed only a few steps away.
But Highfield's style and his ambitions won him enemies. His decisions to bring inHis decisions to bring in Erik Huggers from Microsoft as his deputy (in 2007), and to use Microsoft's digital rights management (DRM) software, were among the touchpoints.
Critics also asked what had happened to the Creative Archive, the BBC's much-publicised bid to open its past content to the public.
In 2006, Tom Coates wrote on his blog, plasticbag.org, about his time working as a senior online producer at the BBC. Entitled "Who's afraid of Ashley Highfield?", his post suggested that Highfield's only experience with Web 2.0 was a Flickr page that had shown him on a private jet "ogling half-naked dancing girls". The post was wildly popular within the BBC, allegedly passed around by senior executives with glee, and it generated ten pages of comments. Off the record, some of his former colleagues today dismiss Highfield as a Paul Smith-suit-wearing, Ferrari-driving incompetent who got lucky and took credit for the success of others. But he seems unruffled by the criticism. "There were a lot of people in the BBC who wanted it to fail," he says. "The more successful I was meant that more money could potentially be taken away from other departments."
But Coates says the criticism had much wider causes. "It's not just the iPlayer, but how long did it take? How much money did it take them? How many people? What were the arguments about? What else didn't get made? Those are the real issues."
By the middle of 2007, Highfield and his team had produced a beta version of the iPlayer, whose interface let only Windows users access programmes. Rumoured to have cost in the double-digit millions of pounds, it wasn't yet ready - three years after being announced. Greg Dyke, for one, told wired that, had he remained director general, the iPlayer would have been ready two years sooner.
But some things were beyond Highfield's control. From 2007, the renewed Royal Charter stipulated that the BBC Trust, its governing body, would test all new projects for "public value". It could take nine months for it to test the iPlayer's impact on the commercial sector, its value for money to licence-fee payers, and so on.
"You have to remember that we were the trust's first public-value test," Highfield says. Also being tested was the trust's faith in Highfield as the corporation's technology guru. "There was 'Do not fuck up' written clearly on my remit," he adds.
The rapid take-up of broadband in the UK had also changed the game, affecting videoon- demand. "It took us the best part of two years to get the technology right," Highfield says. "By the time the trust had given us approval, the world had moved on."
Running out of time, Highfield needed someone to save the iPlayer.
Luckily for him, deputy Huggers found the right guy.
Tomorrow's World
Anthony Rose is 44 years old, not too tall, with thin glasses, long, bushy hair and rapid-fire speech. Growing up in South Africa, he was building circuit boards at 15. The BBC found him while he was working for Kazaa, the file-sharing program that introduced many a teenager to illegal downloading. Rose's plan to launch a legal music-download service, Altnet, met a multitude of lawsuits. "It was all very, very real, but Anthony stayed focused," says Phil Morle, the former chief technology officer at Kazaa who worked closely with Rose for five years in Australia. "He's like a chess player, looking at all the strategic opportunities."
Huggers sold Rose on the iPlayer project. "I thought, 'The BBC?'"
Rose recalls. "What am I going to do in rainy England? Where are my stock options?" But he decided the BBC could offer the spotlight he craved and the stage necessary to do the big stuff. "It sounds like a wank," he says, "but I got used to not getting out of bed if there wasn't an opportunity to change the world."
Highfield emailed everyone in the Future Media division stating that Anthony Rose would be arriving on September 17. But the iPlayer's provisional launch date was December 1. "It was like, whoa!" Rose says.
He was in the office until midnight every night for the first six weeks. "It was a huge amount of stress and responsibility," he says, "but with that comes just a bit of power."
Rose brought momentum. Almost immediately he secured the rights to show BBC content in Flash, the industry-standard Adobe software for streaming video used by YouTube. "We said streaming is the future," he says. Rose kept refining the interface to make it simpler, concentrating on "easy wins" by getting the iPlayer on to Macs, the iPhone and the Nintendo Wii. He also had to explain the BBC's DRM tools to the studios that had previously tried to sue Kazaa. "Some of them were the ones that once sued me personally," Rose says.
The player officially launched out of beta on December 25, 2007.
And the statistics tell of its success: over a million daily users, playing 1.5 million TV and radio shows. The average play time for each show is 22 minutes and 35 per cent of users watch or listen to their show all the way to the end.
As always, content is what counts. "There are a million videos on YouTube and half of them are of a cat sleeping," Rose says. The average time a YouTube video is watched is two minutes, he notes.
This was the winner Highfield needed, and he knew not to mess with a winning formula. "Occasionally he would come down and say, 'Do you know what you're doing?', and I'd go, 'Yes,' and that was it,"
Rose recalls.
He agrees with Highfield's view that the period of intense technological and social change preceding the iPlayer's launch made it hard to get right. "I think a lot of people realised that this was the future of everything and the poor thing got loved to death," Rose says. Everyone at the BBC, technical and non-technical, was telling the developers how the iPlayer should work. "I saw that I had to prevent the rest of the company from talking to them," he says.
Morle, now running his own start-up in Australia, says: "Anthony's someone who asks for forgiveness rather than permission.
He's like a tornado that leaves the room with chaos in his wake, and then people realise that, actually, lots of stuff got done."
Rose likes to wear black. Today, it's a black jumper and black trousers. It's December 2008 and he and his staff are in a meeting on the fourth floor of Broadcasting House. The agenda includes the next-generation desktop version of the iPlayer. Rose sets targets for each task, lapsing into filmspeak ("OK, cut to next week when...") and numbered lists. One staffer, wearing a striped blazer and a pair of grey Crocs, groans that each new target is "another brick in the backpack on the death march". Rose smiles back politely.
Also in December 2008, the team launched the iPlayer Desktop, which is powered by Adobe AIR digital-rights tools, and works with Macs and Linux. They hope this will spike accusations of the BBC's perceived Microsoft bias. Next, Rose is hard at work on iPlayer 3.0. He plans a Facebook-style Friends tab, which will take control of how you watch away from the BBC. Log in and the iPlayer will remind you when Top Gear is on, and it will download to your computer while you do something else. "We'll be pushing stuff to you and you'll be pulling it from the site," Rose says.
The operation is now vast. From the original team of 65, Rose is in charge of 250 people split into 16 teams. The iPlayer team is in talks with BBC Worldwide to make clips available to other websites and blogs. Rose is also exploring using Microsoft's Mesh cloud computing software to host data away from your computer, so you could start to watch a show on your PC and finish it on your iPhone. "We're moving to a new world. Broadcast 2.0," Rose says. "We've been quite instrumental in pushing the industry forward."
The Future Media team is free to move quickly - in part because relatively few in the BBC know exactly what it does. The Last Played function, for instance, was created one Sunday, mocked up in Microsoft Paint and on the iPlayer in hours. "To test new concepts, you have to do most of the work, so you might as well release it," he says.
The iPlayer team is monitoring Twitter, chatrooms and forums to know what people are saying about the service. Rose sees reactions constantly and fires off internal emails about bugs and complaints. "I work hard to make my group behave as a start-up within the BBC," he says.
But does Rose have too much power? "In time, people will understand," he says. "We're thinking well ahead of most."
Last July, Highfield left the team to head Project Kangaroo, the proposed video-on demand service that would use iPlayer to front BBC, ITV and Channel 4 programming. The service was eventually kiboshed by the Competition Commission. But Highfield left Kangaroo for Microsoft after only four months anyway, something that has done him no favours among the conspiracy theorists.
The jury on him is still out. "Ashley was brilliant at setting up Future Media and less brilliant at the technical side of things,"
Rose says. "But anyone who gets £400 million to set up a new-media proposition is clearly intelligent." Greg Dyke, now chairman of the British Film Institute, stands by Highfield. "He's a very inventive bloke," he says. "Ashley's an ideas man and you need ideas men."
In 2000, the BBC website had 3.5 million monthly unique users. By the time Highfield left last year, it had 19 million users, fewer than regularly watch BBC One, certainly, but bettered only by BBC Two "on a good day", he says. It's the UK's third-most-visited website, behind Google and Microsoft.
Yet Highfield's critics, such as Tom Coates, see his approach as having led the BBC away from its public-service roots. "The BBC is a weird exception and the world is changing," Coates says. "The BBC, almost inevitably, will have to conform and adopt a commercial approach. And that would be a shame."
Highfield, and the people he brought in, have a radically different view of public service. "I only do things for the user,"
Rose says repeatedly. For Highfield, the BBC should be concerned with giving people what they want, not what the BBC thinks they want.
Beyond the iPlayer, Highfield's legacy at the BBC is a philosophy of how to operate in a new world. "I went for projects that reached the highest number of people and made the most impact," he says. "I will defend that. If I had done just niche things, it could have ended up like PBS Online."
The BBC has fought to stay relevant in a UK that grows more fragmented by the year. Once, it was almost able to do whatever it liked, but the corporation isn't the only game in town any more. It remains more dependent than ever on the actions of others.
"The challenge is to get eyeballs," Rose says. And the competition keeps increasing. Hulu, the iPlayer's US equivalent from NBC and Fox among others, includes TV shows and archived content such as films for free. At one point Hulu seemed about to partner Kangaroo.
Projects such as the iPlayer can keep the BBC relevant to people who are resistant to the public-broadcaster ethos. "If you make it difficult to watch programmes, people will go elsewhere," says Rose. Broadcasters are doing their utmost to make their programmes as accessible as possible. We might still be watching television programmes, we don't just watch them on television anymore.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
