On Friday, April 17, I attended the latest Web Managers Roundtable event “Making Online Video Work: Lessons from the PBS Web Experience”. It was a showcase of their efforts over the last year to create an online video experience that benefits viewers and local stations alike. We got a sneak preview of the system and were asked not to reveal any details until the embargo was lifted last night. So that’s why this post it late.

PBS Video by Topic

With YouTube and Hulu (which PBS has partnerships with) being the biggest video buzz online right now, it is easy to forget that for a lot of companies, having a proprietary destination still makes a lot of sense. PBS (who everyone knows) works with a wide variety of producers and regional stations, and wanted to create a unified video strategy that would standardize their processes, make their brand experience consistent across all touchpoints, cross-promote their television series’, and incorporate viewer feedback into forming their future programming. The culmination of their extensive planning is their video “ecosystem” which has been rolled out to their pbs.org site (check out the new video beta: pbs.org/video/), pbskids.org/go, and 14 pilot stations maintaining their own sites with varying resources.

Some of my favorite features are:

• You get the familiar carousel of programs, but they are stacked so you can see each episode underneath
• You can also segment the content by topic, so if you are interested in history, you get a list of episodes across all programming series’ that are related and can drill down to subcategories like American History 1800s
• They provide lesson plans for teachers and enhance the programming with assets like the drawing techniques used by Parthenon creators
• For the kids section, targeting the reading ages, they have enhanced the videos with an optional game overlay that ties in a related interactive game while the kids watch the program (talk about multi-tasking!)
• The share the infrastructure with local stations so they can inject their local programs as well as brand the interface
• And it is all SEO friendly and 508-compliant via closed captioning, and transcripts if they are available

Since this is in beta, you can expect that they will be reviewing user behavior and feedback, and making improvements overtime.

BTW, I also had a wonderful conversation with Betty (@BettyPBS) who is part of their interactive team and helping to manage their social media communications for @PBSengage. I was inspired by their internal culture of trust and collaboration. I also loved the way that they ask their producers and SMEs how they plan to “activate their networks” to bring awareness to an episode/series that is about to air. What a great way of using existing networks in conjunction with traditional promotions.

Follow the Web Managers Roundtable Discussion on LinkedIn.

As always, thank you to Julie Perlmutter for coordinating these wonderful events. And thank you to our speakers: Gary Arlen, Angela Morgenstern, Joshua Kinberg, Eric Freeland, and Silvia Lovato. Wonderful presentation and wonderful work!

Update: 

drodio from Point About was kind enough to post the transcript and video of the event on their post PBS Interactive: New Website Launch (1 of 3)

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• PBS Launches New Video Portal for Its Shows (readwriteweb.com)
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