The 14 teams that took part in the two-day BBC Connected Studio hackathon in Cape Town last week will now have to make five to 10 minute presentations to judges on Friday afternoon before the event is concluded later the same day.
Teams had been tasked with generating new ideas and technologies to distribute BBC audio content to the African continent through different mobile platforms. The judging panel included audience members as well as a few faces from the BBC, Google and RLabs.
Speaking to htxt.africa, BBC World Service’s digital development editor Dmitry Shishkin said the teams were given a task on Thursday, started deliberations soon after and presented their ideas to an audience ahead of judging on Friday evening.
“We are really hoping to have a couple of ideas which will have a big impact. We are looking for some innovation,” said Shishkin on the final day.
“BBC has the biggest presence in Africa out of all international broadcasters…and we would like to leverage that breadth, that legacy and that understanding of Africa really well and technology plays a role in that. Africa is still our biggest driver for our audience and we have set a task of reaching 500 million people globally by 2022. We believe that this technical initiative will contribute in a big way to us reaching that target,” he added.
BBC Connected Studio invested in two ideas from the Nairobi leg of the Connected Studio Hackathon. Shishkin emphasised that the BBC does not buy the technology exhibited by the teams, but rather pays for the effort and the time dedicated by the teams to developing the content distribution innovations.
“The teams that come up with particular technical ideas still retain their right to their technology. The BBC does not buy that,’’ said Shishkin.
Shishkin also says that the choice to team up with local tech communities like RLabs in Cape Town and iHub in Nairobi is due to the fact that the BBC would find it difficult to manage the projects from the UK. The BBC expects to announce the ideas that they’ve picked following the Cape Town event by the end of May and estimate that it will take three months to develop them for BBC platforms including their new Africa Live page.
