The BBC spends about £7m a day making television programmes, a figure that must have risen steeply on 7 May with the corporation’s Election 2015, its five-yearly graphics and satellite truck extravaganza.
Meanwhile a group of Broadcast Journalism Training Council students at the University of Winchester mounted a live all-night election programme using just hard work, smartphones, university premises and four 5G mobile phone dongles - the latter costing £100, the only outlay on the live news programme.
This was the second time the students had pulled off all-night election show. Students on the same course covered the 2010 general election as well, using a mixture of pre-recorded interviews and studio discussions between live outside broadcasts using phones and laptops.
After 2010 the BBC’s election night editor Sam Woodhouse said that the student show was “proper journalism, as proper as anything the BBC was doing … it was exactly the same as what the BBC was doing” in terms of broadcasting (or webcasting) and was generally full of praise. Last week he again endorsed the 2015 output and asked to meet up with the student producers to fish for ideas.
Like any group of student iconoclasts, some of their ideas will be stillborn. But others point in the direction of innovation.
Broadcast or webcast hardware is getting cheaper in real terms, but the key issue is that the operating software is getting much, much easier to use. Increasingly students are turning up at colleges as self-contained publisher-webcasters with great visual sense and editing skills. They hardly need to do a course at all. They can jump right in, and start producing TV pretty much on day one.
In 2010 the students still had to plug expensive and bulky Sony cameras into laptops in order to get a signal back to the studio – and the visuals were very poor. This time mobile phones were used for live output. The pictures were not great unless there was decent 5G reception in the area, and this was not always the case. But the connection cost only £25 for the whole night. Use of ISDN lines would have cost thousands of pounds; and a satellite truck possibly tens of thousands.
Video from the iPhone 6 is good enough to broadcast, particularly streamed on YouTube. The fact that it is so small makes access much easier. A whole new – and much more creative – set of camera techniques using mobile phones and devices similar to selfie-sticks is reducing costs and improving creativity at the same time. Earlier this year the Winchester students produced an entire regional evening news bulletin using only mobile phones, claiming to be the first news operation in the world to do so.
But how did the students shape up against the BBC in terms of the quality of content and presentation? You can judge for yourself, since all the output was recorded as it was streamed. That eliminated the need to build a transmitter tower on top of the lecture theatre, saving a bob or two.
There’s an element of subjectivity in deciding whether one TV show is better than another. This said, there can be little doubt that the BBC show was much better than the student effort. Yet it is hard to argue that the corporation’s multi-million pound expenditure delivered a similarly large chasm in quality between its election special and the students’ high-tech but low-budget effort.
Like the big spenders at the BBC they managed after a fashion to produce all the key elements – from showers of gaudy graphics to tautological two-ways from outside broadcast locations, complete with yelping Monster Raving Loonies, jeering Ukippers and interviews with magnanimous winners and self-justifying losers.
Some things will never change.
Chris Horrie is professor of journalism at the University of Winchester