Project Canvas Development Diary
All Out Productions & Stardotstar (aka The All*Stars)
Diary 3: June-July
My first introduction to our Canvas project was a meeting with Lyndon Saunders, Senior Content Producer from our collaboration partner All Out Productions. This immediately brought into focus the benefits of our two companies working together as, whilst Stardotstar brings a wealth of experience of digital interactive design and production, Lyndon clearly was able to provide detailed insight into the way that these technologies could best be exploited in the world of media production.
It is generally agreed that anyone serious about building a genuinely useful online product must stay focused on both the end user and on presenting high quality content. Together our two companies have the experience, the technical know-how and, often more importantly than those, the industry contacts, to be able to address both of those goals. AOP have been able to source rights approved images from a wide variety of streams that Stardotstar could never have timely access to; for example their ability to go direct to record labels for high res artist shots. They were able to provide brilliant insight into “Radio 1 thinking”, which gave us a great starting point for the app and have a depth of understanding and experience in working with live media production pipelines that has meant that the project has been engineered around real life, practical, production considerations right from the outset and is therefore relevant for both the content consumer and the content producer.
So, it is true to say that our collaboration is proving fruitful and the project is certainly benefiting as a result. However, some of the challenges that we have encountered when drawing up the specification for an application that will run on Project Canvas have been as a result of, for one: the existence of the platform was not absolutely guaranteed until a few weeks ago when it was officially approved by the BBC Trust and secondly, the fact that the Project Canvas hardware/software itself is still in development. Practically this has meant that, at the early stages at least, we were making technical decisions that would be hard to reverse later in the build, based largely on a predicted hardware specification – which is not an ideal situation. It also meant that other groups whose input and guidance as to how best to integrate existing, well defined channels (such as radio) and content on those channels with a new platform like IPTV were either not aware of, or not ready to fully commit to progressive discussions and decision making around the impact that a new platform such as Canvas will inevitably have on the current channels.
Never the less, we are confident that between AOP and Stardotstar, we have the combined talents and passion to create something that can showcase some of the potential of this exciting new platform and we look forward to refining our project to create a compelling new visual way to interact with DJs, their shows and the music they play.
Nick Wardle
Stardotstar
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