The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is at present preparing to trial the release of new television programs on its iPlayer platform before they make it in to the scheduled program list. After the successful launch of ‘House of Cards’ on Netflix, the 12-month long trial will have up to 40 hours of programming online before its gets slotted in to regular schedules.
The decision was taken in December 2012, in a meeting which was attended by BBC trustees, but the minutes of the meeting have just been published. The idea has been developed to build up some excitement about the program for the audience. The iPlayer just accounts for 1/50th of viewing figures of the corporation.
Earlier, the BBC had experimented with online–only releases, but it was limited to pilots, specially commissioned material and archive content. Ian Walker, the publicist of BBC content for future media said, “During 2012, the BBC brought selected online-only programs to audiences. These included BBC Three comedy pilots, a Doctor Who web series called ‘Pond Life’, and curated archive programs for BBC Four [sic].” Walker added that they would continue to improve on last year’s work in 2013 and will also make more programming exclusively available to their audiences through the BBC iPlayer.
