BBC iPlayer adds Twitter and Facebook to socialise TV
The BBC's video on demand service, iPlayer is introducing social networking features which should further boost the uptale of Twitter and Facebook in the UK - as if they needed any boosting. The new iPlayer Beta is set to go live officially at the end of June.
Context & Ripple Effects
iPlayer has spent three years widening its reach: after launching on 27 July 2007, the BBC extended it beyond Internet Explorer with Firefox support in early 2008. The new move shifts from broadening which browsers can play shows to wiring the service into social networks — the Beta lands at the end of June 2010.
The timing is awkward for Facebook specifically: relationships logged this same week confirm a tumultuous month of criticism over its privacy handling and a rash of security bugs, so the BBC is deepening its integration with a platform under sustained public fire even as the integration is expected to further lift Twitter and Facebook uptake in the UK.
First-order effects
- UK viewers using the iPlayer Beta from late June can share what they watch directly to Twitter and Facebook, making the BBC's catch-up catalogue a native content source inside both feeds.
- Facebook gains a high-traffic UK distribution point for its social graph just as it fights the May 2010 privacy backlash, while Twitter gets mainstream British exposure through a household-name broadcaster.
Second-order effects
- Rival UK catch-up services face pressure to match built-in sharing or cede discovery conversations to whichever player embeds the social graph first.
- The BBC's product roadmap becomes partly dependent on two US platforms whose policies — as the current privacy row shows — it does not control.
Third-order effects
- If broadcasters keep folding third-party social layers into national media infrastructure, regulation of how public-service content data flows to private ad-funded platforms becomes an open question.
- Television viewing trends toward being a shareable activity by default, shifting competition from who holds the rights to who hosts the conversation around them.
The trend: Broadcast video-on-demand platforms are absorbing social networks as a distribution and discovery layer, turning shared viewing into a growth lever for both sides.