Pete Clifton - 8/11/2007

[Huw Baines]

Pete Clifton arrived in Cardiff after green lighting changes to the BBC online service that he has been part of since its inception 10 years ago. The BBC site will soon be offering complete mobile news and embedded video on news stories and already offers the reader links to the most read and emailed stories on the site. In his answer to a question towards the end of his talk he admitted the shortcomings of the site in terms of a lack of Premiership football highlights. Despite this shortcoming I think the BBC site offers the best and most wide ranging sports coverage on the web.

Those running the site will have to maintain their high standards if they are to bypass problems such as the lack of Premiership football available to the BBC. During the RWC this year the blogs of Ben Dirs and Tom Fordyce were good examples of how entertaining, vivid writing can work around the lack of video. The BBC will have to rely on writing like this alongside other technical innovations for their web service if the price for rights continues to spiral away from their budget.



Away from Premiership football the sports section of the BBC site exemplifies the changes mentioned by Pete Clifton. The main page is full of video links, journalist blogs, forums, "Twitter" and on match days live feeds from Scrum V and Radio Cymru. Also, "behind the red button" on digital services there is multi screen to be found in tennis, athletics, horse racing and language selection for Welsh viewers. As a sports fan it is great to have this amount of content so readily available. Now, if they'd just raise the licence fee to about £500 a year we could have Premiership football too...