The BBC is to phase out the pop-up player that it currently uses to host the majority of its audio and video content in favour of a newly developed embedded Flash player.
The new player has been developed jointly by the journalism and iPlayer teams, so says the BBC Internet blog, as a replacement for the pop-up which relies on using Real or Windows Media formatted video.
Use of the new payer has so far been limited, but over the coming weeks embedded video is expected to become the norm.
It’s hardly surprising, last year Pete Clifton, head of BBC News Interactive, talked to Journalism.co.uk about the experimental use of embedded players across the BBC News online.
During that interview Clifton said that initial tests had shown up to a 40 per cent conversion rate, where people reading stories were also watching the embedded video.
In its standalone player format, he added, the conversion rate was about two per cent. Channel 4 News found about the same.
But he also touched on a another significant point; video embedded into stories, he added, was proving to be popular with audiences as these videos tended to dispense with the traditional news ‘package’ format, instead just showing the footage necessary to enhance the text story sitting beneath the embedded player.
Getting this right is as important as changing the technology to a more user-friendly approach.
So it’s win-win. Better standard of content and technology for the user, fewer headaches for the developers having to reformat all the video
The Crown Jewels indeed.
