How iview came to be

Full screen video, high definition codecs, broadband speeds, streaming video services on every device that has a screen - these are all normal parts of our lives now. Indeed, we’re so in the now these days that we think of most digital services only in the present, but they all have an inception date. And iview's – with its brand new look – was this time ten years ago.

A decade is a lifetime in online years. In June 2008, I was at ABC leading a handful of colleagues in delivering iview, “on the smell of an oily rag” as one executive put it at the time.

The hierarchy of media consumption has been completely upended since then – video now sits at the broad apex, followed by the reinvention of personal audio and trailed by long form text.

Today, we’re inundated with ways to watch video content, it’s re-wiring the way we consume narrative. Long form video is in its ascendancy, and screen-based text can seem daunting compared to the aisles upon aisles of on-demand programming, always available at a time of our choosing.

A decade ago, the two main factors that would make an on-demand TV catch-up service viable was bandwidth and full screen video. There’s an obvious third which is audience demand, but it depends upon access to the first two factors.

Ask Google when online full screen video first became a thing and the algorithm struggles to give you a straight answer, but it was a little over a decade ago. Before then we lived in a world of windowed video that sometimes could be magnified! Looking back, courtesy of this ABC video below, it really does have the feel of another time!

Then the wonders of technologies such as RTMP streaming and Adobe Flash enabled full screen video, and a new tier of infrastructure and economics came online. Companies such as YouTube were enabled to emerge into the video giants of the present.

Whilst Australia still lacked a domestic broadband market, this time 10.5 years ago was realistically the first moment that a service like iview could be practically considered. Even then, as a domestic service, it would be ahead of the widespread availability of broadband services (copper based ADSL2 was still a promise when I pitched the vision for iview).

In 2007, I was a digital producer in ABC News, immersed in new forms of digital storytelling, creating special editions of Four Corners for this fledgling broadband market. These editions of particular documentaries produced interactive and in depth content around the core of the program, augmenting the depth of research that goes into the standard 44 minute TV program.

The advent of full screen video playback allowed us to push a little harder on the RTMP streaming service that we’d turned on at ABC for the first of these special editions, back in 2004. It now gave us a more televisual, if ropey-looking version of the program. But it was full screen!

iview’s origins came at a nexus in recent ABC history. Mark Scott had only just become Managing Director and was gracing the org with a bold vision for grounding ABC’s future in digital, convinced that this was the new foundation of media. For content makers like myself trying to forge ahead in digital, it was the ideal message from the high tower.

Scott was influenced by BBC’s structural alignment to a similar philosophy, and one of his first moves was to disband the division of New Media and Digital Services as a statement that digital was now to be seen as business as usual in the much larger foundational divisions of Radio, Television and News & Current Affairs. A smaller division, ABC Innovation formed up under the late and greatly missed directorship of Ian Carroll. Innovation was charged with doing just that, and encouraging the corporation at large to act digitally, by example.

It was Ian who asked me to come and work in Innovation as Creative Director of Strategic Development, (the fanciest title I’ve ever had). My first project pitch was a full screen video catch up service: it was the perfect time, slightly ahead of the curve, it would provoke the industry broadly to get on with the business of broadband. It seemed to me a textbook ABC project – fulfilling charter obligations; including reaching audiences in new ways and in greater numbers, whilst innovating in the digital medium and extending the life and production value of high quality content.

We spent under a year on bringing iview to market: developing the technology, designing interface, and integrating this with the ageing but extraordinary ASP content management system, officially and fondly known as Wallace. XML transformations between Wallace and a proprietary Adobe Flash/Air front end allowed ABC employees across the organisation to upload and update their content streams using a relatively similar content management interface. Enthusiastic rights managers negotiated the first wave of online broadcast rights for iview’s modest initial offering, and after prototype testing the service for a few months, its launch was reasonably trouble-free.

Innovation promptly handed the service to ABC TV and I moved on to other ABC Innovation projects, including the AFI-awarded Gallipoli: the first day, the alternate reality online drama, Bluebird AR, and the digital documentary The Opera House Project, among others. Meanwhile, iview grew up and was joined in the market by other players. At ABC, dedicated teams and appropriate funding were organised around the service, and it became the broader and essential platform it is today.

In the 2008 edition of IDM (as pictured), I explained our technical approach and the sort of figures we were beginning to see: 2-3,000 hours per week, a month after launch. How times have changed, notwithstanding the ironic ABC cardigan.

Many people have been involved in iview since its inception, and hats off to them. But here I wanted to shine a light on the people and effort at its origin – to Ian Carroll, Abigail Thomas and Mark Scott for supporting the pitch and the project. And to Charlie Szasz, Lisa Romano, Le Tran and Robert Stewart for the hard work in our little corner of the ABC, making the thing happen on the smell of that oily rag. 

Sam Doust works across many areas of digital interactive content, in many roles. For more detail, visit Latchkey.