The BBC’s Electric Proms – job well done
Posted on Monday, October 29th, 2007 at 6:29pm. #
Photo by Rich007 from Flickr. Used under licence
I was always proud of the work that my team did at V Festival, but the BBC’s Electric Proms, a week-long music extravaganza across the BBC’s radio, television and online outlets, probably takes the biscuit in terms of website event backup.
On mobile, the team put together a daily 80-second video update on what’s been happening at the BBC Electric Proms, and even branched out into some colour web-pages on a mobile, which for the BBC is a rare and exciting treat.
On the web, the BBC Electric Proms website includes a ton of videos from every single act except one; and half the acts were “specially filmed for broadband” (which does, yes, make a difference). Neat. The team used Twitter to post blow-by-blow accounts of each of the gigs, too, and they also made lots of their photos available to share (the above isn’t one, actually) – but you can take individual images, a photoscroller, or see images on Flickr or Photobucket. Click on ‘how to add this photos to your webpage’ on a page like this, for example. And, yes, if you’ve got photos, the BBC wanted those too. There’s Google Maps mashups, and some other stuff at the events themselves.
And on interactive telly, there have been four streams of live sets on Red Button for a week around the festival. Even 90 minutes of the old geezer at the top of this post.
Finally, the neat thing – the BBC also added these gigs on Last.fm, Upcoming and Facebook, growing into communities of their own and doing a good job allowing decent Google web searches.
This isn’t quick or easy stuff – but was clearly thought out very well. I’ve always thought it a shame that radio ratings figures never show you the impact of something like this (whether the Electric Proms or the V Festival) due to the smoothing effect of a six-month RAJAR survey. But Andrew Barron and all the myriad of people involved have done us proud, I think. This is taking stuff that sounded great on the radio, and made it even more immersive online – adding some really well thought-out user generated content.
And now, if you don’t mind, I’ve some Macca to watch.
