Posts tagged Olympics

I spent a fascinating hour at the home of the BBCs digital broadcast team this week — alongside hundreds of casual-wearing young things networked in silo after open-planned silo at the broadcaster’s White City campus.

“We are busy creating the television of the future,” said my friend and I did not doubt him. Except that by the time he and his fellow wizards have worked their wonders we may not be calling it “television” any more.

Their projects sounded spell-binding, especially what they plan to offer up on occasion of the 2012 Olympics. It got me thinking that the London Games is bound to represent a pinnacle of British achievement in at least one field of endeavour: digital media.

The army of iPlayers at White City have a unique role in all that: their mission is to deliver the most dazzlingly rich and layered media product we have ever seen … and to make sure their work goes unnoticed. Because if they get it right, we should not even be aware of their achievement. We would be too busy enjoying the most networked and interactive Olympic Games in history.

I for one could happily live without the Olympics in the UK, but I can’t wait to see what the iPlayers come up with for the occasion.

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* “ … over time I began to take delight in this peculiar feature of my job,” writes Philip Connor, of his early days as a copy editor at the Wall Street Journal. “That my success was measured by how rarely people noticed what I did. In this way I believed myself akin to oil-tanker captains and air-traffic controllers, those anonymous technicians of social stability whose identities become known only through catastrophic failure.” Today he might include the technical personnel who maintain our digital worlds.