The BBC strives to be cutting edge in providing services to households throughout the United Kingdom. The broadcaster made the move to HD long before many broadcasters and is formulating its 3-D TV strategy. Danielle Nagler, the BBC’s head of 3-D and HD, discusses these areas.

VIA SATELLITE: What are the BBC’s plans for 3-D TV?

Nagler: We are certainly not looking at a channel launch. We are looking to explore two things. Firstly, what can be done creatively with 3-D, and how it can develop from what we have seen in cinema to the television we watch? Secondly, we are keen to explore what audiences think about 3-D, whether that is watching 3-D TV through their television or watching television programs made in 3-D. They are slightly different things. To explore these we will do a series of one-off projects. Some of those may be around events, and some of those maybe designed around program content and they will all complement the experimentation going on elsewhere. We want to explore the core areas of content that the BBC is involved in, and to really figure out what 3-D can add to what we do in 2-D for audiences.

VIA SATELLITE: How important is 3-D TV for the BBC?

Nagler: This may seem like we are sitting on the fence, but although this is an interesting development in television, it is quite early to take a definitive view on how mainstream it is going to become and what the timescale is going to be for 3-D TV. That is not a judgement on other forms of content that people may consume in 3-D outside of television content. On the whole, we are not in the movies or the gaming business, and therefore we are focusing on 3-D and television programs in terms of our consideration of the market. We, do of course, look at any kind of information and look at things to see whether they are relevant to the development of television. We can only really answer some of these questions by playing with 3-D and experimenting with it, which is what we are doing now.

VIA SATELLITE: Are you surprised by how some broadcasters have embraced 3-D TV?

Nagler: Those that are active in 3-D TV are active for a variety of reasons, which are not necessarily related to the number of 3-D TV’s sold and the number of people who actively watching or looking to watch 3-D TV content. Also, from a BBC perspective, we have quite a different position. We have to focus on the mainstream. In HD, we went in early, and we led its development in the United Kingdom, as it was proved to us that HD was going to be the future standard of television for broadcasting. Therefore, it was very relevant to all that we did, and it was important to us that we were actively involved and to make sure that higher-quality television was made available over time to everyone. I don’t think 3-D TV is in that category. I am not overly surprised at the activity we have seen. I think the numbers of people consuming 3-D TV services right now is still quite low, but I think it is great that a whole variety of players are getting involved in television innovation, and from our point of view, that is a much healthier television market in the United Kingdom than the BBC being the sole provider of R&D to the industry. We are always keen to work with others who are experimenting in 3-D TV. I don’t see it as a threat to what we are doing. I see it as a positive development.

VIA SATELLITE: What are the main technical issues in producing 3-D content?

Nagler: It requires a whole different way of considering what you are making. The technology tools are relatively new, and, therefore, are still developing in terms of their reliability and capabilities. That presents challenges, but I think what is the most challenging is that actually there is no absolute formula for good 3-D TV. Every project that is undertaken is slightly different and raises slightly different issues. There is no real rule book. There are rules starting to emerge on how you manage depth for a television-sized screen, but that is emerging rather than already designed.

That is always quite exciting that you have a development where you can play with it and see what it can do, but on the other hand, bad 3-D TV really looks bad. There are not a lot of margins for error. It can be a bad experience for viewers, so that can make it pretty challenging. 3-D can’t very easily be integrated with 2-D capture without quite a lot of compromise for both 2-D and 3-D. Therefore, effectively, it is not just a separate technology, it is also a separate workflow, and you need different ways of editing. You need additional specialists in areas such as performance stereography, for example. You also need a director of production who has a good understanding of these elements. That is tough to find all these elements, as this is all very new, and there is not a substantial amount of expertise out in the market or anywhere in the world.

VIA SATELLITE: What are your plans for expanding your HD content?

Nagler: We are expecting to hit a point this year where the majority of content for the BBC is in HD. That excludes news, which won’t move into HD for at least another couple of years, but the majority of other content will be made in HD this year. That is a very considerable increase in a short space of time. That has been made possible because this is seen as something that is very important to us as a broadcaster given the production quality of what we are doing.

It is also important to us because consumers are actively selecting to acquire HDTVs in huge numbers. The United Kingdom has more HD-capable TVs than anywhere else in the world. HD connectivity lags in places like the United States, but it is growing fast. We expect data will show that 25 percent of homes will have an HD connection by the end of 2010. As a broadcaster, it is important to us that we don’t just have a service that calls itself HD but doesn’t offer a huge amount of HD content. BBC One HD has come later into the market than some of the other simulcast HD channels, but when it did arrive, it arrived with a very sizeable amount of HD programming within the schedule.

VIA SATELLITE: Will your satellite capacity needs grow due to 3-D and HD?

Nagler: We run HD channels for the United Kingdom. Each of these channels requires satellite capacity to broadcast across all platforms, and satellite is an important part of the HD story. For us, the satellite constraint on our HD portfolio is around the availability of the U.K. footprint capacity, but in terms of our thinking about how our portfolio develops and when we move across and develop further HD simulcast channels from the BBC, I don’t see this as a major problem. We never intended to offer more services at this point. It is important that when we launch a simulcast channel, we are able to offer a substantial body of HD content within that schedule. Our plans for the future take that into account, and there will be sufficient U.K. footprint capacity to accommodate those plans.

3-D TV is very different. We don’t have any plans to launch a 3-D TV channel, so this is not a big issue, but around any event we might do in 3-D TV, given where the market is at the moment, our thinking about distribution is quite broad. We want to make sure that anything we do in 3-D is available to as wide an audience as possible. At the moment, in the United Kingdom, that means considering satellite and digital cinema, which also requires satellite. As projects come along and we consider the right distribution model for each project, we would be looking to attain satellite capacity to support that, but that will be on a project-by-project basis.

VIA SATELLITE: What do you hope to achieve over the next 12 months?

Nagler: I would expect that all of our flagship BBC programs would be made in HD except the news. I would expect that we would be producing between 2,500 and 3,000 hours of HD a year, and that would equate to at least 60 hours of new HD programming from the BBC each week. I would certainly hope that both our HD channels were popular with audiences. In terms of 3-D TV, I would hope we would have behind us a number of very different projects that audiences have been able to enjoy in different ways from the BBC in 3-D. We want to establish the BBC as a creator of high quality 3-D content. We hope that we will have added to the international television industry in terms of what 3-D TV can do for television content and what audiences think of that experimentation. I don’t think we will be any closer in 12 months time to the BBC having its own 3-D TV channel. I also hope that we will have thought hard and maybe done some work around how audiences can access 3-D content so we are able to reach whatever tools they have put into their home that is 3-D capable.

VIA SATELLITE: Will this expand beyond live 3-D TV events?

Nagler: My hunch is that people will acquire 3-D TV through a range of devices and different purposes, which may not be around watching a live 3-D TV channel, so we at the BBC try to anticipate what is going to happen next, even though many viewers themselves have not made the decision. We want to try and ensure that we can support that and make sure our 3-D TV content is available to the widest range of people and on different platforms. That is quite tricky but not impossible.