Tim Anderson’s ITWriting

I’m at Qcon London listening to John O’Donovan, Chief Architect, and Kevin Hinde, Head of Software Development, both from the BBC.

They are talking about video on bbc.co.uk. Previously this has been handled through pop-up pages that give a choice between Windows Media Player and Real Media. The BBC will now be standardising on Adobe Flash video, embedded in the page rather than in a pop-up. Their research has found that embedded video has a much better click-through than the pop-up style. It also has editorial implications, because it is better integrated into the page. In due course, Flash will be the sole public format (an archive is also kept in some other format).

There is going to be increasing video on the site. Apparently the BBC is getting better at negotiating rights to video content, and we can expect lots of video from this year’s Olympics, for example.

As far as I can tell, this has nothing to do with iPlayer, the service which offers the last 7 days of broadcasting online. This is mainly about short videos of news content.

Incidentally, I’m disappointed that we are not getting more detail on the rebuilding of the web platform about which I posted earlier, though it has been mentioned in passing as a move to dynamic publishing. That was more interesting to me, and perhaps more in tune with what Qcon is about. Still, this is worthwhile as well.

Technorati tags: bbc, flash, windows media, real player

Seeing the Comscore report on British media sites (which confirms the amazing reach of the BBC web site), and the amusing commentary from  Chris Matyszczyk, prompted me to check out my the stats for this site and blog, which I track occasionally through Sitemeter.

I was aware of writing for a global readership, but was surprised at the extent of it: according to these figures, just 8.1% of you are from the UK. In case you can’t see the chart, it shows 43.4% US visits, followed by the UK as stated, then Australia and Canada at 7.1% each.

At Sun’s Global Media Summit recently, we were separated into regions for one of the sessions. In my feedback I said I was more interested in the global perspective; the above chart shows why.

After all, this is the Internet.

Update

Sitemeter doesn’t say exactly what period its stats cover (at least, I can’t find this). It seems to be quite short, so the stats vary considerably. The chart above understates the UK readership and therefore overstates others. I’d have to take several snapshots at different times to get a truer picture. Still interesting though.