We spend a lot of time at the moment at the BBC talking about what does and doesn’t work as web video. There’s general agreement that the standard video package – what you would normally see on the main TV news bulletins – isn’t usually ideally suited to the web. It aims to tell the general viewer the basics of a story, whereas we think the web visitor is probably looking for something more.
This piece from James Reynolds, the BBC’s man in Beijing, looks to me exactly what works best on the web. He’s not trying to tell the whole Tiananmen Square story – just illustrating what happens when a Western correspondent tries to get into the square right now. It’s both informative and amusing – and it plays to the strengths of TV, telling a story with pictures.
Interesting how so much of the best web video would make great TV as well.
TV news can be so predictable and I sometimes think that having to reversion content for a different platform – and thinking hard about how we do that – helps develop new storytelling techniques that work anywhere.