'If you look at iPlayer from a distance, it's still very web 1.0'

Erik Huggers became director of the BBC's Future Media and Technology (FM&T) division in July 2008, following the departure of Ashley Highfield who left to join the ill-fated Project Kangaroo.

As well as overseeing the Beeb's digital content, including the hugely successful iPlayer, Huggers is responsible for delivering the corporation's enterprise and broadcast technology strategy.

In an exclusive interview with silicon.com, Huggers discusses the future role of technology in broadcasting, his views on Project Kangaroo and his love for the Palm Pre.

silicon.com: iPlayer has been a huge success but what does the future hold for the service?
Erik Huggers: We're working at a lot of things the whole time - the whole concept of iPlayer is we're in perpetual beta. The thing never finishes. It's like a living organism, it's always on the move. Every week iPlayer shifts new features and functions, some of which never see the consumer because they happen in the engine room.

In the greater scheme of things I personally believe we're just scratching the surface. I think that it's still very early days and, while it's fantastic to have over 300 million videos delivered in a single year, compared to linear television we still have some ground to make.

We've got room for improvement on things like audio and video quality itself. Today's technology is fantastic and it gives you a very stable, reliable experience, but I think there's an opportunity to do a bit of something with video technologies that are a bit smarter and understand a bit more about your capability on the PC and broadband pipe.

So if you have a very fast broadband connection, maybe we can give you automatically much better quality and if you have a slightly slower broadband connection we'll give you the best quality that your broadband pipe can afford.

In a funny sort of way, if you really look at [iPlayer] from a distance, it's still very much a web 1.0 proposition. Sure, it's fantastically successful but at what point do you start to weave social functionality through the iPlayer?

Wouldn't it be nice if you could tell iPlayer that every time you watched something or listened to something it automatically tweets on your [Twitter] account so that all your friends know, "Hey, you watched Top Gear" or "Hey, there's a fantastic thing you heard on Radio 4"? We want to give consumers the ability to share their experiences with others.

I'm [also] interested to see what the possibilities are to allow consumers to share segments of video, played back on iPlayer obviously - call it a bookmark within video. There is a concept of trying to embrace in a smart way, the viral abilities of the web - getting our current user base to help us build more awareness, excitement [and] more value for money out of the service. Around the whole social theme, expect some exciting stuff from us.

What about technology for the BBC family of websites?
One of the areas that I'm quite excited about is this whole thing around widgets. You've seen us do quite a bit of work on the homepage and I think that was a toe in the water. [For example] you've seen us do some efforts with the embedded media player which is frankly a Flash-based widget, you've seen us deploy the Adobe Air-based iPlayer desktop. And so I'm quite interested in how you turn bbc.co.uk, which has so much to offer, into widgets that you can stick on your desktop, you're happy to share with your friends on Facebook, take with you on your mobile phone and, if our IPTV ambitions all come to fruition, you get to stick on your television as well.

Is semantic web something your team is looking at?
Yes, we have a lot of interesting and very smart people working on things like [semantic tagging method] RDF, we have a lot of folks working on other semantic technologies. And I think the first efforts in that space are aimed at the category of music, the next category could be something around natural history.

Although, here's the thing with semantic web: I think semantic web for the sake of semantic web is not interesting. Semantic web leading to new audience propositions that previously weren't possible is very interesting. So whenever people come and talk to me about the semantic web I always say I'm interested but only if it is clear what it means to our audiences. [If you don't do this], before you know it, you end up boiling the ocean - there's so much one can do.

What are your views on the demise of Project Kangaroo?
It's just a very unfortunate situation, whichever way you look at it. I know that my colleagues [in BBC Worldwide] and our colleagues in ITV and Channel 4 have poured their hearts out to get a fantastic value proposition to UK consumers and it's unfortunate that [it's] been stopped by the Competition Commission.

Interview continues on page 2