The BBC’s red button Olympics experience – the best damned interactive TV service ever

The first time I became aware of the Olympics on television was probably 1964. I can’t be sure but I expect there were a few measly snippets of the Tokyo Games each day on ITV and the BBC. In  the States, ABC paid £1.5m for a paltry 14 hours’ worth of programming (less than an hour a day). This year, if you’re on the internet or have a satellite or cable TV subscription you can watch every single event live in its entirety.

I was the suit in charge of the launch of the first multistream video interactive TV red button service on Sky from Wimbledon in 2001. Any satellite viewer could choose any one of five simultaneous live matches. For many years, mainly due to the cost of satellite bandwidth, five streams remained the gold standard. This year, TV viewers can choose from 24 separate video streams. As the BBC wouldn’t spend the money for all that bandwidth, I can only assume they’ve come to some arrangement with BSkyB, who probably didn't want to offer less comprehensive coverage on their platform than Virgin Cable. (That's just a guess, but I used to be involved in those sorts of negotiations.)

As a tennis fan, for instance, this means I’ve been able to catch every men’s singles match I’ve wanted to see: it’s been like having two Wimbledons in one summer. Fans of any other sport will have been in the same gloriously privileged position.

Mail Online published a schizophrenic item which started by complaining that half of the 24 red button TV channels had attracted fewer than 10,000 viewers (boo!) – but then went on to admit that several had been watched by well over a million (er… hurrah?). So, amazingly, some sports are more popular than others and sports featuring British medal hopes get more viewers than those where Guatemalans are battling Cayman islanders for the top prize. Astonishing!


The fact is that the BBC has led the world at interactive TV for the last 14 years. That may not sound important, but just look at how excited we're getting at Brits winning gold  in sports we'd never previously heard of and can't understand even when they're explained to us. (The Frogs - typically - used to claim to be world leaders in Interactive TV, but we simply beat the living crap out of them, time and time again.)

The only slightly sad thing about all this – for me at least - is that the current Olympics service marks the end of an era. Never again will so much satellite bandwidth be expended on so many simultaneous video streams covering one event. Olympics 2012 is a one-off. When the next Olympics kick off in Brazil in 2016 – in fact, for any sports event from now on - your satellite box will have to be connected to your broadband router (either wirelessly or via an Ethernet cable) for you to access this cornucopia of sporting riches. The good news for Freeview viewers is that, if their box is hooked up to their broadband network, they’ll have the same stupendous full-fat sports experience as satellite and cable viewers for the first time.

I was involved in the first BBC web-on-TV experimental services back in 2001/2002 – the results were painfully slow, clumsy and ugly. But now the technology has come of age. I realise all this won’t mean much to any of you, but at the end of the Olympics I’ll be saying farewell to an era of broadcast technology to which I made a small - albeit entirely untechnological - contribution.

Nice to see it go out with a bang.

If you have even the remotest desire to experience what I’m talking about, go to any BBC channel showing live Olympics coverage, press the red button and click right till you get to the "events are now live" box at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen (see illustration above). When I first did it a week ago, it almost blew my mind.

The less sexy part of interactive TV – the BBCi text service, whose launch I described here – is used by 12 million viewers a week, and will continue to be delivered via the traditional route. Which is good, because I'm one of the 12 million.