BBC Announces…What?

Beeb, have owned an Island for a while. For many months they have been plugging Second Life.

An never once did they mention this fact. Highly suspicious for a public broadcast corporation.

As I understand they are doing a documentary some time this year, i wonder if it will feature its own island.

And Whey is it no one mentions there.com.

Hardly a wonderful use of tax, I mean license fee, money, is it?

A place for young teens to hang out, don’t we have them already? They’re called parks! Our tax money funds them …

Even more apparent, is their lack of “money and finances”, clearly pushing their socialist agenda even further … come on, kids at that age should be getting paper rounds, pocket money … earning money for the big wide world.

The one BBC would no doubt love to change to Venuzuela if it had the chance and the budget … ah, the wonderful world of liberal fools.

Long Live The BBC.

Kids that age should be out playing in parks and kicking a football about, I can’t understand why the BBC would want to waste the license fee money on things like this.

Informative and Educational like the BBC should be, I don’t think so.

Entertaining probably yes, but just think mummy and daddies the recent rise in the license fee is paying for this.

I wonder how elaborate it will be and if kids will be attracted to it.

If I were a Brit I might be a little peeved at the use of tax dollars as the previous commenters rightfully are.

Why would you be peeved? The BBC’s mission is to serve everybody, that’s what’s so excellent about it. I’m sure it does stuff that you’d love that others would hate. That’s kinda the point: everything it does it not supposed to be appropriate to someone not everyone.

Erk, last line should read:

everything it does IS supposed to be appropriate to someone, not everyone.

Well kai, I dont believe in the government funding of such projects, including television stations. I could care less what Brits choose to do as its their country, not mine.

IMHO, state-run anything is far less effective, efficient, and productive than the same enterprise run privately. Just my take, and I hate to bring politics into this discussion.

Maybe we could debate this topic in the future on my website. Sign up for the beta and we’ll see you there.

Couldn’t resist. State-funding of TV ain’t my cup of tea either, but why is it that I trust the BBC more than any other TV station in the world (plus I like their programming a helluva lot). Definitely beats the pants out of any station in the states and it’s not even close.

@Mike:

Actually BBC has been very diligent about reporting on MMOG’s and virtual worlds. Recently (last two years) they have done quite a bit more reporting about this space, because it is part of a larger trend of the population engaging in participation via MMOG’s and virtual worlds. You can actually count on even more coverage as the convergence of web 2.0 and virtual worlds happens.

If you step back and take a broader view this is not a competitor for SL. Any more than MTV’s Virtual Laguna Beach, Virtual Real world or the newsly announced Hills, all based on thier shows, which I should add allows users to seamlessly move between all three Virtual Worlds. A little far out?

From a commercial POV combine this with advertising, mobile alerts, mobile games (11bn by 2011) social networking and any other aggregated services you can imagine, then think about the inherant purchasing power of the demographic of 12-28 year olds, still a bit to far out?

One of the top websites flying under the radar of everyone is runescape and habbo hotel, you think SL has great revenue streams, try again:

Go check them out: Runescape.com, Habbo.com

Thats a combined 10m or so users mostly kids, engaging in RMT (real money transfer) for in game items.

That said, there are other reasons to build a virtual world, the study of this space is just begining, (blogs.terranova.com) from a sociological point of view, and etc. and therefore these spaces are a fertile ground to understand peoples engagement with a VW, especially kids who are the early adoptors that in 10 years will be saying “of thats so web 2.0, 2D”

I’m betting its going to be used for a number of purposes, a safe enviornment for kids, academic studies and even to encourage virtual learning (wisdom of crowds for 12 year olds) “yeah my math tutor lives in New Zeland man!”

I’ll go out on a limb and say this is likely based on the There.com platform, the screen shot looks like thier work and they can deploy a VW platform fairly quickly (thats who MTV is using btw)

More importantly, little data is available about games, and about this demographic and about usage and consumption patterns, that is why we started gamemarketmetrics.com

Emphirical observations in the comments so far about how kids “should be outside” are opinion premised on the fault assumption that kids are being anti-social by participating in games/virtual worlds. I posit that this is mostly inaccurate based on the current trends. Kids are interacting, thier interacting internationally and across boarders with people from other countries and in an incraesingly complex world this is a good thing.

As to them not getting exercise, our data based on our beta population proves again that this is another fallacy.

Only the most broad demographic and consumption patterns are known about gamers 18-36, and I can assure you almost nothing is known (or its proprietary company information and unlikely to be released) about 7-17 demographics so a monetized 7-12 VW space if well built will attract kids and likely be profitable.

Looks great.. It keeps amazing me how game development progressed over the years. Game industry is like web2.0 - it spreads and grows very fast, the only difference, web2.0s don’t make money - they eat it all. But I guess, if you run something like Egio and hire a bunch of young developers who gain some experience and money in the meantime - why not? Better than keeping everything in the bank, ain’t it?

Quality of broadcasting, high to low:

Al Jazeera English -> BBC -> France24 -> CNN International -> CNN, etc.

Really, anything below the BBC’s level is just about worthless, though.

As for the BBC, is this product part of their taxpayer-funded core mission? Other than that question, though, I’d fully expect the BBC to cover themselves as best they could. Don’t see anything controversial there.

As far as announcing a competitor to SecondLife - i say why bother? Roll out a simple social networking flash app/game, and grow it to be whatever you want. No need to let potential competitors in on your plans. Again, though, what is the mission of the BBC?

>> Users will be able to “create almost every aspect of their avatar” and money/finances will not be a part of the world.

I wonder whether the creation of world items be the part of such creation possibilities? I mean player’s ability to change almost everything in the game world, landscape too. For example, some players community decides to flow a river between 2 existing hills etc.

Another good point is user’s ability to upload new items into game world, for example, someone designs new sword and takes it into the game etc.

“Al Jazeera English -> BBC -> France24 -> CNN International -> CNN, etc.”

Im no fan of CNN, but Al Jazeera is very anti semitic and biased against the United States. The validity of their stories has also come into question on several occasions. So for quality of broadcasting I would rank Al Jazeera below CNN.

I respectfully disagree.

Without money/finances, this is non-news. I mean it could be a really cool app/videogame for youngsters, but cool videogames are announced daily :p

Hello Techcrunch from the UK. It would be odd for the BBC not to develop a virtual world. Its product should be very UK centric, so different from what’s already out there. The BBC is big in education and parenting. There isn’t a school in the UK that doesn’t use BBC resources on and off line every day. Commercial educational software companies dislike it and took the BBC to the High Court to try to stop it producing software for schools. http://education.guardian.co.u.....97,00.html

According to a post on the BBC Backstage mailing list its a licenced version of this game engine:

http://www.larian.com/kick.php

Or if your language skills are up to it:

http://www.ketnetkick.be/

Aparently its actually been in development for quite a while.

Yes, we are based in the UK.

I have no problem with the concept of public broadcasting, but surely the beeb shouldn’t be doing things that CAN be done by the private sector. A virtual world - seems very ‘me too’. It also drives out competition because its hard to compete with free (read Radio1).

I hear the licence fee is going up to £130 next year. I bet you’d have a hard time convincing americans to pay $250 for public broadcasting!

I think this is a good idea, I have no problem with licence payers money being spent on it. At the end of the day if there is a safe place for children to have fun and they can enjoy it from anywhere its good. You have to remember that this is mosts likely aimed at kids that could not afford to pay for this sort of thing. Thinking of the BBC as just TV or Radio is narrow minded. I spend a lot of my time on the BBC websites.

My only thoughts on it are that if they create it on an open source platform then they should release it.

The people complaining about the licence fee being wasted on this should look at the digital tv roll out that the bbc is being stuck with (I.E having to pay for digital settop boxes for people that can’t afford them).

Some people seem to be happy just to watch a bunch of advertising amongst their TV shows it seems! I have absolutely no problem paying the TV licence as it’s money well spent in my opinion.

My experience of US / Canadian broadcasting is a huge quantity of channels but dreadful quality, the same is true of what’s available on the Cable and Satellite channels here in the UK. I just yesterday cancelled my full TV package that I have with Telewest primarily due to the poor quality of shows and endless repeats (and they thought it was ok to ‘increase’ the price for that?!!).

The BBC channels give much better programming than the commercial channels. Speaking as a parent of a 4 year old, the CBeebies channel is excellent as my 4 year old is not barraged with adverts every 10 minutes like it tends to be on the commercial channels.

Also, let’s not forget that the BBC is investing a lot to make as much programming available to view online as possible, they’re doing a lot of really interesting stuff that just adds to the value of the licence fee.

That’s my opinion anyway!

I was at a BBC innovation day recently and this virtual world was mentioned although they weren’t allowed to give too much information away, I would guess that this is probably more complex than a flash game.

This is probably a part of the BBCs efforts to try and reduce the drop-out rate that they have from CBeebies (

…to CBBC. They have a problem with retaining male viewers too so an online world may help to keep boys interested in the CBBC brand.

They should broadcast porn to keep male viewers. I’d be all over it, for sure.

Kula bácsi you realise cbbc is for kids right

Would they have written about it? Absolutely. Second Life has been featured on News 24 more times than I can count, it’s been discussed on radio so many times - an hour of Five Live will be used to discuss it today.

The BBC Click programme has featured it with one of TechCrunch’s own contributors and there’s loads of articles on the BBC News site on it.

Fletch,

I do find it a little confusing. The BBC has been forced to drop a number of things I really enjoyed because it “could” be done by the commercial sector. And then something like this is announced. Needless to say, those programmes and ideas have not been recreated outside the BBC.

Surely this would/should have had a Public Value Test, just like the Hi Def trial and iPlayer?

Hook ‘em while they’re young.

I bet Gary Glitter and Jonathan King are signing up for accounts already.

“Kids that age should be out playing in parks and kicking a football about…” — Kyle sounds like my mother 25 years ago.

I think it’s a smart move, maybe - it’ll depend on how they use it. I like the BBC’s moves with regard to the Web - they take risks, they’re trying the right kind of things (even if they’re not maybe all that beneficial), etc. and have been for some time - if you look at U.S.-based companies that are similar, they seem a lot slower to get it.

Virtual worlds kind of freak me out, honestly. But, I think for the right demographic on an entertainment platform, it can be a good draw for the audience.

I wonder if my kids will be able to take their World of Warcraft gear in…..

As posted above, a version of this game is indeed already in use in Belgium, under the name of “Ketnet Kick”. Ketnet is the name of a tv channel for kids run by VRT, the public broadcaster in Flanders (Dutch-speaking, northern part of Belgium).
My own kids love the game (yes I live in Belgium) because it features some voices, characters and games which they already know from the tv-screen. I certainly like it better than the average PS2 or XBox game.
And for the VRT, it seems to be an excellent way to cross promote between tv and internet.

This is an amazingly smart move by the BBC, moving in kids’s virtual worlds. The design of the game engine is well done, looking at the Belgian prototype and the features that will surely be added by the BBC’s fall launch will surely be even better. It would be smart for an American kids company to license the software before the Nicks and Qubos of the worlds corner this market. Video games and mobile software gadgets designed for kids can rolled into the designs I hear. The kids design firm Oddtoe is already working on States-side work of kids virtual worlds. The problem for most companies is funding, of course, and COPPA-compliancy (kids Internet laws). That’s why licensing is key.