Tag: bbc

In my previous post, Part 4: The Pull, I talked about why, given all of these issues, independent companies continue to pitch for digital commissions from the BBC. In this post I’ll explore some of the problems faced by digital indies including low pay, and lack of prestige, reach, and creative control.

I also realise that this series has taken far too long for me to write, so I’m going to conclude it here in an accelerated fashion, which will hopefully relieve everyone concerned. That means that I have not taken quite as long to proofread or edit it. But something is better than nothing, right?

Poor Pay

Historically, I’ve found that BBC digital commissions – for apps, for websites, for games – don’t pay an awful lot. And while the pay has improved considerably in recent years, it still doesn’t recognise the significant cost involved in pitching. The BBC is not really any worse than other organisations in this regard, but pitching just sucks. I think we were pretty good, all things considered, at pitching – we had an above-average success rate at Six to Start and we won some big projects. Yet even so, we lost far more than we won, and that uncertainty made it difficult for us to hire full-time employees.

Instead, we had to use contractors and freelancers, who cost more than permanent staff and took their knowledge and experience with them when they left (making it harder to maintain projects). As a result, bigger companies that can pitch and develop for multiple projects simultaneously can significantly outperform smaller companies, which explains the drastic consolidation in digital indies of late.

Similar problems exist for indie TV producers, but the sting of pitching is lessened slightly because there’s a much greater acceptance of contract/freelance workers in that sector, and because they often get to retain some commercial rights in their shows (unlike digital indies, who usually get nothing at all).

Conversely, the cost of producing and self-publishing apps, games, websites, etc., is low and declining, so the attraction of £20k or £50k or £100k from the BBC isn’t as much as it used to be, if you can raise £30k from Kickstarter and make a decent game prototype in half a year.

Low Prestige

People will hate me for saying this, but the vast majority of digital work done by indies for the BBC isn’t even remotely prestigious. I recognise this contradicts an earlier point I made (that indies love working on things like Doctor Who), but hear me out: the work isn’t likely to win an Independent Games Festival award, or an Apple Design Award, or a GDC Award, or honestly anything that gets you significant respect from peers. You can bullshit TV people about how many downloads your vanilla app got, but you can’t bullshit a digital person – and they won’t care that your app is about Doctor Who.

And the truth is, apps made by indies (i.e. not iPlayer, BBC News, BBC Sport, etc.) are unlikely to reach that many people. BBC TV may get everywhere, but apps don’t. Not even the ones for big TV shows, because ‘calls to action’ are hard to get (e.g. “If you liked this episode, download the app at http://www.bbc.co.uk/whogame”)

Little Creative Control

The briefs I received from BBC commissioners were often highly detailed, specifying the type of game or website required, the story beats, the characters, the educational points that needed to be covered, and so on. That’s fine – it’s the BBC’s money, they can do what they like. But as a creative person and a creative company, it’s just not very interesting.

Once again, I’ll use Doctor Who as an example – you may think that it’d be great for the BBC to do a proper Doctor Who game that tied into the TV show. Unfortunately you are unlikely to get to do anything particularly interesting as you’ll always be second fiddle to the TV show’s needs. This is perfectly understandable given that the TV show gets millions of viewers a week, whereas your game or app can only hope to get a fraction of the audience. Why bother doing anything at all for smaller platforms, why waste Steven Moffat’s time (or any of the other production staff) when it’s better spent on the TV show?

The problem is that this is a classic innovator’s dilemma, where the BBC is failing to meet their audience’s unstated or future needs for interactivity. Apps may seem cheaper and lower quality and less popular but they do many things differently and better. One day we’ll want more interactivity from the BBC but the necessary skills and experience just won’t exist there (also, I’ve never bought the value for money idea behind focusing on TV production; if that were true we’d just made radio, or perhaps books).

Scheduling Problems

The TV industry is a strange beast; it has things like transmission (TX) dates where they decide – with alarmingly late notice – when a show is going to be broadcast. These decisions appear to be a dark art where channels size each other up and try to ‘win’ particular timeslots or nights. Accordingly, when we were making The Code, we didn’t know when the TV show was going to be broadcast until a few weeks beforehand; we’d finished most of the work but due to this uncertainty we had to keep the team together, idling on other work. Once again, this is expensive, it favours larger companies, and it’s not something that many indies realise when they start out.

Long Timescales

While the commissioning process isn’t that long, the process of making a TV show can still take years. Ideally you want the digital people to be involved right at the start, coming up with the concept for the interactive stuff – and you don’t want that changing drastically over time in case it causes problems with the TV people. But in digital, speed matters; what’s cool today may no longer be cool next year, let alone after two years. To be fair, this is not true of all digital ideas, but it does rob many a project of its freshness.

Personal Relationships

Success in pitching – and in production – can depend on personal relationships with commissioners. I know this because I’ve both benefitted and lost out from my relationships (or lack thereof). Commissioners can, and will, tell you details that aren’t in the brief. This is not because they’re corrupt – it’s because they aren’t necessarily amazing brief-writers and they don’t have enough time or resources to do a good job. If I bump into them at a conference and ask them a question about the brief, then they’ll probably answer, because they’re not misanthropic assholes (so yeah, good luck if you hate conferences or networking).

Commissioners also want to work with people whom they know they can get on with and whom they trust – after all, you’ll be working together for months or even years. Newbies don’t know this happens; it’s only people who’ve pitched and lost who do. Yet the necessity for these relationships puts even winners off as their commissioners will eventually move on.

Pitch Perfect

Unsurprisingly, a system that requires indies to pitch rewards those who are good at pitching. It is truly amazing how much a pitch matters. Now, in defence of the BBC, one could argue that a good pitch is a proxy for attention to detail, the ability to make good looking content on a deadline, and understanding the market. I think there is some truth in that. However, it’s easy to be dishonest in pitches, and it’s also easy to ‘cheat’ if you’re a big company, by wheeling out your big-hitter Don Draper-alikes for the pitch and then throwing a bunch of juniors onto the project afterwards.

Even the best indies will be lucky if they have a 50% success rate at pitching; a 30% or 40% rate is more likely. And good pitches can take weeks to put together, which means that while you’re producing one project, you’re probably pitching for two or three other things. Talk about distracting…

Tech Problems

Maybe things have changed in the last two or three years, but the BBC’s tech requirements were a total pain in the ass, adding considerable time and expense. There was always some weird new bizarre problem that cropped up every week; maybe you weren’t able to use a particular subdirectory, or a module was completely out of date. Every month you’d hear about some amazing new idea like BBC ID or Games Grid that usually didn’t work well and didn’t add a lot to the end user experience, but had to be implemented for political reasons – until you complained enough that that requirement was removed at the last minute. Endless meetings, endless emails and documentation, all for a service that was massively more expensive than Linode or AWS. Yes, I know the BBC has to have rock-solid security, etc, but I sure as hell am not interested in dealing with that if I can make more interesting stuff elsewhere.

You don’t learn a lot

There is a charming belief that your experience at the BBC will help you in related industries. Perhaps that’s true if you make TV, or if you want to continue pitching for tech projects at big organisations – but it sure as hell isn’t true for most industries. When you’re selling games or apps or services to end users, the entire production process is different; marketing is different; sales are different. It requires a totally different skill set. Like Ray in Ghostbusters says, “You’ve never been out of college. You don’t know what it’s like out there! I’ve worked in the private sector… they expect results!”

Indies Keep Quiet

Most indies are quite rightly afraid of pissing the BBC off – who wants to burn those bridges? – so they keep quiet about all of these problems in public and they don’t share knowledge. Yes, the BBC solicits feedback, but bitter experience demonstrates that it changes little; and the cases where I have given critical feedback in public, I’ve been dismissed as a troublemaker by senior BBC staff. It would be sad if it wasn’t so funny.

Lack of Visibility for Indies

It’s hard for indies to learn about new pitching opportunities. Putting aside the execrable Bravo Solutions pitching interface, which I believe is being replaced/improved, the fact that you need to download a PDF from the Connected Studio website to learn about what the BBC is looking for is, well, insane. Have these people not heard of the World Wide Web, or Hypertext? Wouldn’t it be better to have that information on a webpage, perhaps? Or maybe create a newsletter and let indies just sign up to a weekly notification of new opportunities? You could probably do it for free with Mailchimp.

Doing roundtables and talks for indies (which are admirably held around the country) is not the same as having a really awesome website. In fact it punishes people who can’t spare time or money to attend briefing. Put all that shit online, do communication online.

At the end of the day

The best indies in the business aren’t applying for BBC digital products any more. Why would they want to work for less money, with less creative freedom, with less production flexibility, with an unpredictable bureaucracy that rewards skills and experience that aren’t applicable outside of the BBC?

ALTERNATIVES/IMPROVEMENTS

Q: What about BBC Connected Studio? Isn’t that totally awesome, really transparent, and solves every problem you’ve mentioned?

A: To be fair, I wouldn’t know because I haven’t participated in it. From what I can tell, it’s not about making original interactive content; instead it’s more about new ways of presenting existing content, something I acknowledge as being important but not the only thing the BBC should be doing. Other producers and developers who have been through the process have also told me that most pitches end up looking very similar, which doesn’t speak well for the amount of room for creativity.

Q: Adrian, you criticise the BBC a lot here, but you’re actually just a blowhard. What’s your solution?

A: I have a few suggestions, some of which may not be politically acceptable, but what the hell:

1. Spend more money on more things. This allows for greater risk taking. The current situation of spending lots of cash on a few projects is a false economy. Yes, I did say that the BBC didn’t pay a lot, but that’s judged against the work required. Digital indies can still do great things with £10k or £20k providing that the scope is controlled and they don’t have to go through hell and back during the pitching/production process. (Related: Do things faster.)

2. Don’t require all the tech be built on the BBC platform. Every time I do a project with BBC tech, our developers ask never to have to do it again. Yes, the BBC is a big organisation, security issues are important, etc., but consider this: The Open University is far more flexible about hosting and tech, and I don’t remember hearing any data-loss scandals from them yet.

3. Stop changing priorities and processes all the time. Every three months I feel like there’s some new fad or technology or genre that a commissioner or controller gets obsessed with after going to some media or tech conference. It makes it impossible to pitch really good, timeless stuff.

4. Be more open and more online for commissioning and production. Gather independent criticism from the best in the business; if you don’t know who they are, look at winners of Apple Design Awards, talk to veteran developers like Dave Addey (who, sadly, has left British shores and gone to the promised land – Cupertino).

Crazy Ideas That Just Might Work

1. Run a prize (you know, like the longitude prize). It’s actually kind of a terrible idea that puts a lot of cost on entrants and usually works for things that have payoff beyond actual prize money; and it also requires easily judged criteria, and smart judges. But it’d be pretty neat to watch.

2. Inject a market signal into the commissioning of original digital projects – for example, provide matched funding to crowdfunded ideas that meet certain BBC criteria. This process is absolutely gameable – see the Ouya debacle – but it’s not irredeemable. Certainly it’s better than getting ‘audiences’ to vote (for free) on what they want, but it does punish those who don’t have the money to ‘vote’ with. Maybe you could get people to vote with shares of their licence fee, which would be doable if the BBC end up requiring people to log in to use iPlayer.

3. Multiply the number of funding bodies. There are already other groups who award money for digital commissions: The Wellcome Trust, Lighthouse, Arts Council, etc. I have helped The Wellcome Trust with judging pitches; their process isn’t perfect, but it’s far faster and no less fair than the BBC’s process. In other words: if the BBC can’t fix their digital commissioning problem, maybe others can. Indeed, this solution works better for digital projects than for TV or radio content because – thus far – the BBC haven’t claimed original digital interactive content as a core part of their strategy. Have some funding bodies focus on popularity, others on art, others on games, etc.

4. Totally abolish digital commissioning at the BBC and do some kind of blanket incentive to R&D tax credits or games tax relief. This is the Nuclear Option #1: “Commissioning doesn’t work, so we just won’t commission any more.”

4a. Totally abolish digital commissioning, and just get TV indies to do it; The Malcolm Tucker app is a great example of a good digital product for a BBC show that nevertheless doesn’t actually involve the BBC.

5. Nuclear Option #2: “Just pick winners – don’t waste time getting indies to compete against each other.” Many big, successful companies I’ve worked with don’t bother with competitive commissioning because they just hire (who they believe to be) the best. This is unworkable for the BBC for political reasons (it conflicts with the supposed aim of championing small indies) but I mention it because it’s so successful for, you know, pretty much everyone else on Earth.

6. Nuclear Option #3: “Stop commissioning, do everything in-house.” Not a bad idea assuming you can get the right people (e.g. Government Digital Service) but again, politically a non-starter in these capitalist, market-driven, competitive times. But times change…

To end on a positive note, I can unequivocally state that the BBC is not the worst organisation I have encountered for digital commissioning. That title goes to the EU’s Horizon 2020 process, which rewards projects for having – no joke – 10+ partners over 10+ countries, taking place over 3-7 years. Now that’s a real nightmare.

In my previous post, Part 3: World Enough and Time, I talked about the problem of focusing on kids and educational digital projects; commissioners being too busy; not competing against the best; and being unduly influenced by big tech companies. In this post I’ll explore why, given all of these issues, independent companies continue to pitch for digital commissions from the BBC. Also, I’m aware this series is getting a little long, so I’m going to be a little briefer from now on.

Given the litany of problems I’ve talked about with digital commissioning at the BBC, why do independent companies continue to work with them? Clearly projects still get made, so it can’t be that bad, can it? There are indeed a few solid reasons why indies choose to pitch the BBC; however, not all of them are very good news, though.

Money

Getting commissioned by the BBC means that you’re guaranteed to get paid, whether or not it’s successful or popular. In comparison, trying to self-publish your own game or app comes with a hefty degree of risk. So, if you can’t compete in the commercial marketplace but you are good at pitching to the BBC, this is a great way to run a business.

Learning

Commissioned projects can be a good way to learn new ways of designing and developing projects while still getting paid. Never made apps about the weather before? If you can get commissioned to do something for the BBC, you can learn on the job. The downside here is that what you learn at the BBC may not be applicable in the commercial sector, but even so, it can still be a useful experience.

Exposure

The BBC is one of the biggest and most respected global brands, and shows like Doctor Who and Sherlock have tens of millions of viewers. Creating websites or apps related to those brands can expose your company to a wide audience; you can also get access to conferences and festivals which will help with networking and sales. Whether or not your project is any good or not hardly matters; conferences love getting speakers from the BBC since they can attract attendees. However, as people become increasingly aware that the real action online is happening with ‘original’ apps like Candy Crush, Minecraft, Angry Birds, and Snapchat (apps that can make hundreds of millions of dollars from hundreds of millions of players), the glow that’s associated with the BBC is starting to fade.

Excitement

It’s exciting to work on projects for the BBC! Where else do you get to work on something like Doctor Who or the Olympics? The BBC’s TV and radio shows still regularly attract audiences in the millions – something you’re unlikely to achieve for your own app or website. A commissioned project allows you to shortcut the uncertainty and grind of making your own thing and immediately get in front of a lot of people.

But, of course, it’s not all roses…

In my next post, I’ll explore some of the problems faced by digital indies including low pay, and lack of prestige, reach, and creative control.

In my previous post, Part 2: The Magic Roundabout, I talked about commissioners moving in and out of the BBC all the time; why there’s a strong incentive to mislead everyone on how awesome your commissions were; and why the BBC is so risk averse, particularly for digital projects. In this post I’ll explore the problem of focusing on kids and educational digital projects; commissioners being too busy; not competing against the best; and being unduly influenced by big tech companies.

Education, education, education

If you’re under 13, the BBC offers a veritable cornucopia of games and interesting digital projects; everything from simple quizzes to experiments in live TV-synced mobile gaming. I’m not totally clear on why, as soon as you turn 13, the BBC completely loses interest in making lots of games for you, but I think it’s related to the erroneous belief that ‘kids’ like to play games and use digital devices in a way that adults don’t. Because it’s so important to hook audiences while they’re young, it’s justifiable to use any means necessary – including making games – to get them to love the BBC.

Now, it would be anticompetitive for the BBC to make a bunch of fun games freely available to the public, so usually there’s some semblance of educational content in each of them*. That ethos of ‘we can do digital or gaming stuff as long as we can justify it as an educational project’ has infected the entire corporate such that pretty much every game ends up having some kind of educational content crowbarred in.

One notable offender is the Doctor Who Adventure Games. There are many problems with these games; one of the most egregious was that when you encountered some historical artefact such as a black cab, the Doctor spout some Wikipedia-style text about how there used to be 40,000 back in 1940. Not only was this completely irrelevant to the small matter of killer Daleks roving the environment; not only was the factoid utterly dull; but crucially, you never hear the Doctor crowbarring in such education in the TV show.

No doubt some commissioner decided that it’d easier to justify the game’s existence (and budget) if they pretended that it was educational, but it had the effect of worsening the overall experience. My pet conspiracy theory about why the BBC likes making educational games is because it gives them internal cover when the audience figures are disappointing. Precisely because you can’t quantify the educational benefit of something, you can always suggest that your expensive game that only got 10,000 players was still worthwhile because it was ‘educational’.

Finally, I don’t have anything against educational games – I’ve designed some for the BBC that I consider to be pretty neat, in fact – but believe me, they are super, super hard to do in a way that isn’t either boring or non-educational.

Solution: Stop requiring that games include educational components. We don’t require that of all TV shows, and we don’t even require that of all CBBC games either.

We don’t have enough time!

I once worked with a commissioner who asked us to email detailed status updates to her before our regular meetings. No problem – perfectly reasonable thing to ask for. What wasn’t reasonable was that when we sat down to meet and looked at the printouts, she was clearly reading the status updates for the first time. Since these updates could be quite long, there just wasn’t enough time for her to properly take them in, so she’d ask us questions that were already answered in them; or she’d pick out a single particular detail and comment on that.

I remember becoming pretty upset about this; why did she ask us to prepare all this stuff if she wasn’t even going to read it properly? It was only later that I realised that she – and many other commissioners – really didn’t have the time to read and comment on status updates. These days, commissioners don’t just commission TV shows and digital projects – they’re off giving talks at conferences and workshops across the country, they’re performing outreach to schools, and they’re in the multitude of meetings and reviews that comes with working in a big bureaucracy.

Of course, she could hardly admit that she didn’t have time to do her job properly, so she continued to ask for the status updates and continued not to read them properly. I believe this hectic scheduling also means that commissioners don’t have the time to write detailed or interesting briefs; to research new ideas; to read through the many, many pitches they receive for every brief; and just as importantly, to understand what’s happening in the wider industry. It’s not the worst job out there, but the BBC and Channel 4 and other corporations don’t make it easy for them.

Solution: Give commissioners more time for their core responsibilities. If necessary, require that a certain minimum number of hours per month is spent on each brief or commission.

The right competition

Speaking of understanding what’s happening in the wider industry, I’ve found that some commissioners (not all) have an incomplete idea of what’s popular and what’s state-of-the-art when it comes to digital projects and games. This is a particularly bad problem with higher level executives (e.g. bosses of commissioners) who really don’t have the time, or perhaps the interest, to keep up with digital happenings as much as they might do for TV.

As a result, not a day goes by without seeing some internet person at the BBC or Sky or Channel 4 claim that their new app or website is the best in the world, when a cursory examination of the market would reveal otherwise. It doesn’t help that industry awards like the BIMAs and Digital Emmy Awards confine themselves to TV or video-based interactive projects without comparing them to the usually far-superior products found outside those industries. The sort of media conferences that commissioners speak at are also pretty bad for finding out what’s state-of-the-art, simply because the creators of those projects aren’t interested in those conferences.

Solution: Hire people who have a genuine interest in the field of games and digital projects, and are not liable to be taken in by flashy but ultimately mediocre projects. This is hard to do if the people doing the hiring (e.g. controllers) have no idea what constitutes ‘genuine interest’; in which case I’d suggest the board (or BBC Trust, or whoever) try and hire a good digitally-minded controller. Of course, they themselves may also have no taste, in which case you’re pretty screwed.

Bad influence

Google, Microsoft, Apple, Disney – they’re big successful companies, all involved in media to some degree. Surely the BBC could learn a lot from them? Surely it’s worth high-level execs at UK broadcasters visiting them for fact-finding missions?

I’m not so sure. The practices of tech companies (Google X, 20% time, etc.) are often not applicable for the BBC due to its completely different mission and its wider range of stakeholders. The BBC, for better or worse, cannot move fast and break things; and more easily implemented ideas like making offices fun and colourful in order to stimulate creativity are sadly mistaken. These things may be suitable if you’re raking in billions, but they’re better seen as lagging indicators of success. The filmmakers at Pixar and the writers of The Simpsons used to work in featureless white rooms, and they were plenty creative.

The BBC doesn’t have the luxury of spending money like this. I’d prefer them to trust their own developers and technologists to figure out what’s right for the BBC, not what’s right for the latest tech startup.

In the next part, I’ll explore why, given all of these issues, independent companies continue to pitch for digital commissions from the BBC.

In my previous post, Part 1: Setting the Scene, I talked about how it’s difficult to judge the success of any commission (digital or otherwise) particularly when the BBC’s many conflicting stakeholders mean that the definition of ‘success’ is highly debatable. In this post I’ll be looking at commissioners moving in and out of the BBC all the time; why there’s a strong incentive to mislead everyone on how awesome your commissions were; and why the BBC is so risk averse, particularly for digital projects.

The Magic Roundabout

Like civil servants and politicians, BBC commissioners frequently move between the public and private (independent production companies) sector. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this; moving to an indie is a good way to get promoted, get more experience, and of course, get a higher salary. Indie companies, for their part, get the benefit of the commissioner’s experience of how the BBC operates and their relationships in the sector.

This means that if you ever hope to advance your career it doesn’t pay to make enemies. Being open and honest about the failure of a particular TV show – even if you didn’t commission it – means that the indie company that produced it is understandably going to be pissed off with you. It won’t endear you to other indies either, since if you did it once, maybe you’ll do it again to them. Some regard it as a good thing not to publicly criticise other TV shows or companies; if you don’t have anything nice to say, why say anything at all? I disagree, of course, because I think that’s the only way we learn. In any case, there’s not much to be done about this tradition of omerta – humans are humans, and the TV world isn’t so big in the UK, where trust is important.

Unfortunately it goes further. This magic roundabout of moving between the BBC and the private sector generates a strong incentive to mislead or misrepresent the success of projects you’ve commissioned so that you get more credit and get promoted quicker (e.g. “The website got five million unique users in just three days!”). I don’t know whether this misrepresentation necessarily happens within the BBC, but it most definitely happens at public forums and conferences. Particularly with digital projects, it’s highly unlikely that anyone will contradict or challenge your misrepresentations because:

1. There is no independent authority that measures the traffic of digital projects; this is in contrast to TV ratings which are very public and allow everyone to understand what’s been popular and what hasn’t (and of course, the BBC doesn’t readily release online traffic numbers either), so they can’t prove anything
2. They don’t want to make enemies or be labelled as a troublemaker
3. They don’t care

Eventually the truth does come out, usually when all the old commissioners have left and a new crowd want to pin every problem on the previous regime, but of course by then years have passed and millions have been wasted.

Still: there are good reasons why commissioners would want to move to the private sector, and I’m not suggesting that misrepresentation is common, or that people do it knowingly. But even assuming that everyone is an angel, very fact of commissioners’ mobility means that knowledge and experience are continually lost; it takes time to understand how to navigate the BBC, how to commission good projects. Compare this against institutions like Pixar and Apple where staff will stay around for a long time. It is unusual that the BBC has this level of mobility given that it has a sense of a mission that many commercial companies lack; but perhaps the problem is that that mission has been weakened to the point where other factors (money, power, excitement) matter more and can be found elsewhere.

How to fix this? You could either:

• Encourage commissioners to stay longer by: paying them more; providing tenure (although of course that means that bad commissioners could stick around longer; making the institution a more attractive place to work (tautology) OR
• Make it so that individual commissioners coming and going can’t ruin everything by: spreading responsibility; building up a Pixar-style brain trust, where institutional experience and skill is better retained and spread

Risk Aversion

In large companies that have many different stakeholders (including but not limited to the BBC), long production timescales and bureaucracy mean that it can take years between making a commissioning decision (“Let’s make a user-generated chat show for BBC Three”) and getting the results. The longer this process takes, the longer it’ll take you to learn any lessons. That’s a fact of life for TV, but it’s worse for digital projects and apps because the BBC just doesn’t make that many.

When you finally do get the results, you get the classic problem of overcorrection. As Wikipedia says:

Negative feedback is often deliberately introduced to increase the stability and accuracy of a system by correcting unwanted changes. This scheme can fail if the input changes faster than the system can respond to it. When this happens, the lag in arrival of the correcting signal can result in over-correction, causing the output to oscillate.

In other words, if your commission was a big success, let’s make five more; and if it was a failure, let us never speak of it again for the next decade. Perhaps if there were five or ten times as many digital commissions being made, the signal would be stronger and the BBC could tolerate outright failures since they’d hopefully be balanced out by huge successes. As it is, if you’re a commissioners with a small budget, then you’ll want to be conservative and only do what’s been proven to work.

(This risk aversion doesn’t apply to every aspect of broadcasters though; in my experience, the BBC and Channel 4 legal departments were always very accommodating with the weird things we wanted to do online. In fact Channel 4 legal actually encouraged us to put more swearing in our game for teens!)

How to fix this? Increase the number of projects being made and/or make them more frequently; this probably involves spending more money. Also, develop a better system of fast internal feedback as employed by Valve and Pixar, who have consistently managed to make incredibly successful big-budget games and movies every few years without the apparent feedback of the market.

In the next part, I’ll explore: the problem of focusing on kids and educational digital projects; commissioners being too busy; not competing against the best; and being unduly influenced by big tech companies.