8 Feb. Uni of Westminster Seminar - A TV Show by any other name: The changing meanings of “multiplatform” at the BBC - James Bennett
Title: ‘A TV Show by any other name: The changing meanings of “multiplatform” at the BBC’
Date: 8 February
Time: 2:00-4:00 pm
Room: A6.7, University of Westminster, Harrow Campus, Northwick Park Tube
Dr James Bennett
Senior Lecturer in Television Studies, Royal Holloway, University of London
All welcome, but please notify Dr Anastasia Kavadia if you wish to attend: <[log in to unmask]>.
Abstract: In 2006 the BBC launched Creative Future, a five-year editorial strategy that promised the wholesale transformation of the public service broadcaster to “enable 360-degree commissioning and production and ensure creative coherence and editorial leadership across all platforms and media”. Announcing the restructure Mark Thompson, the BBC Director General, heralded the boldness of the BBC by proclaiming “wherever possible we need to think cross-platform: in our commissioning, our making, our distribution” (Thompson, 2006). Yet by the end of that five year period multiplatform had come to mean “simply delivering [linear] content across a range of different devices”. Based on interviews with over 30 BBC insiders, this paper charts the changing the meaning of multiplatform at the Corporation. From a 360˚ future of platform native content envisaged in 2006, the BBC has come to define multiplatform in terms of the iPlayer and programmes delivered online. “Multiplatform”, therefore, has increasingly come to mean a “TV show by any other name”.
Biography: Dr James Bennett is Senior Lecturer in Television Studies. His work focuses on digital television as well as TV fame. He is currently the Principal Investigator on a 2-year AHRC grant, multiplatforming public service broadcasting (AH-H018522-2), which examines the role independents and multiplatform productions play in the future of PSB. He is the author of Television Personalities: Stardom and the Small Screen (Routledge, 2010) and the editor (with Niki Strange) of Television as Digital Media (Duke University Press, 2011) and (with Tom Brown) Film & Television After DVD (Routledge, 2008). His work has been published in Screen, Cinema Journal, Convergence, New Review of Film & Television, and Celebrity Studies Journal.
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