| Home > Media > The BBC leads the world in interactive drama and entertainment innovation - and Sophie Walpole leads the BBC |
| The BBC leads the world in interactive drama and entertainment innovation - and Sophie Walpole leads the BBC | | Date Created: 02 Dec, 2005, 02:10 PM |
 Who does the BBC work with? What is its commissioning system? Head of interactive Drama and Entertainment, Sophie Walpole, says the BBC has just been reviewed by the Government and has been found to work poorly with new UK-based companies that have fresh ideas in the digital media space. So the BBC will be trying to locate those UK-based new ideas - and get them off the ground - in 2006. That doesn't bode well for Australians wanting to work with the BBC. But perhaps the turn of the Asia Pacific region will come down the track...
In the mean time, the BBC's Walpole talks about the BBC's new IMP media player and its significance for the global media landscape. Does it give the BBC an exciting new onramp to the world's broadband-enabled livingrooms and their new entertainment systems? How will the BBC exploit that new global presence? And what does the finding of the Australian courts in the Kazaa matter mean for the BBC's strategy with IMP?
Walpole also describes what research shows UK people want from the BBC - content free of schedules and unleashed from the TV to work widely across new devices and platforms. And she talks about how the BBC is dealing with audience generated content. The Times newspaper in the UK once called Walpole a "cow" for shutting down the BBC's chat rooms. In this interview, she describes the philosophy behind that decision and how the BBC's position on audience generated content may change as the world's media moves increasingly to long-tail based democratisation. For now, however, its war: "they want to break everything the BBC does" says Walpole, talking about the hacker groups who try to ruin the BBC's chat rooms and so on.
One response by the BBC is to concentrate on the production of tools that will allow people to create their own content online and upload it to the BBC for potential publication and use, both by the BBC and other audience members. This, again, is a potential new paradigm shift for the world media. Another is to innovate in areas such as "alternative reality games" where Jamie Kane is reshaping the rules of content for young audiences.
Sophie Walpole originally worked in 1995 at Channel 4 as launch editor for www.channel4.com. She stayed there for nearly five years as head of the interactive department responsible for www.filmfour.com digital text services and was involved in the commissioning of the very first Big Brother.
She left to find a fortune as Editorial Director of the dotcom WorldSport which crashed on the day she arrived. Indeed, Ms Walpole lost all her money there and she speaks in this interview about what she learned in that period which might be of benefit to young entrepeneurs starting out today to exploit the new technologies and media characteristics.
For Ms Walpole, the death of WorldSport led to a period of consultancy, working for broadcasters and a range of internet content providers. Then she joined the BBC first as Head of Content in 2001 and subsequently as Head of Interactive Drama and Entertainment from 2002. She speaks here with 3 years under her belt in the hot seat. This is an uncommonly detailed insight into the thinking of one of the world's most powerful content executives.
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