A team from BTexact is hoping to improve the following recognisable story.

You come home from work on a wet, cold November evening. You close the door behind you, fix yourself a TV dinner, turn the fire on and slump into your favourite armchair. You reach for the remote and zap the TV into life. You cruise through the channels seeking something to watch: something to amuse you, something to grab your attention. Nothing. There is nothing on that you like; well nearly nothing. The one programme you do like has 10 minutes left to run so there's no point in watching that.

With hundreds of television channels available, why does this happen?

It's a matching problem. A matching problem in two dimensions: time and interest. Schedulers have their approach, they build theme nights on cooking, history, makeovers and gardening (so if it's Wednesday then it must be. gardening). They place the news at the same metronomic time each evening and anchor the evening around the soaps. Device manufacturers, too, have their approach; they give you video recorders so that you can 'time-shift' the schedule, they even give you digital video recorders that can 'pause live TV' (whatever that means) and that learn the type of programming you like, and record it for you just in case you wanted to watch it.

How are the content creators dealing with it? Well, they are building programmes for ever more precise audience niches and adhering to increasingly familiar formulae. With such tightly defined niches it can be difficult for the producer to correctly identify and target its chosen audience; and if the producer misses this audience, then small viewing figures spell low ad revenues and no repeat commission for the producer.

The classical approach to this 'matching' problem is to provide good searching facilities and to append short-hand descriptions that define the style of the content (such as action, humour or romance) and allow the potential viewer to quickly identify content they might like.

The radical approach being promoted by BTexact is to enable a media production process that allows the media to be changed to suit your preferences, 'on the fly'. With this production system, the media can be flexed to suit you, the viewer. So if you like action, the media will include more action; if you like humour, it will include more humour; if you enjoy in-depth analysis, then that is what you get; if you don't have much time, then a short programme is what you see.

There are two major challenges: one is conceiving and capturing media that can subsequently be flexed, the second is creating tools and rules that make this process relatively simple. The second challenge is being tackled by a mixed team of developers and creatives from BTexact. The prize? Open media, larger possible audiences and higher revenues.

This does demand a radical rethink of the contract (explicit or implicit) between the TV viewer and the TV channel and this will take some time. But in the meantime the production tools created by BTexact allow producers to create multiple versions of content from the same media, allowing content creators to rapidly re-edit their content to suit different audiences. One obvious way that this could apply is in the creation of educational material that can be flexed to suit either undergraduates, schoolchildren, or the more casual interest requirements of broadcast television.

The tools that enable this have been developed (as at September 2002) to an early prototype stage by a team of developers in BTexact, who are working with media creatives to refine, test and demonstrate the tools. The tools can also be applied in the creation of games content, and BTexact is working with creatives in the games industry to explore the capabilities in this medium, similarly exploring the value of allowing the games developer to generate more flexible content.

So if we wind back to that cold, wet November evening, you slam the door, you fix the same TV dinner, you slump in your favourite armchair and zap the TV into life. Only this time, you find that there is a range of TV programmes that suit your tastes, all about to start. And with these programmes, you can choose how long they are going to be.

And, whilst you are not aware of this, in your neighbour's house a similarly slumped viewer sees some of the same programme titles, but the style and content within those programmes is slanted to suit their preferences; the same actors, the same story, but a different pace; the same newsreader, the same structure for the news, but different news items.

As you sit in your comfy chair, eating your TV dinner, the expression on your face is not disappointed, not exasperated, but happy.


By Doug Williams, BTexact