Multimedia Highlight: A tale of two Planets Earth
Here's a tale of two multimedia projects and a rare glimpse into how the exact same copy can render in two completely different ways.
The subject? Planet Earth, the new(ish) series on Discovery. We've been TiVoing it because we never seem to be home when shows originally broadcast. I'll say this right off the bat: the footage is stunning. Amazing. Memorizing.
Planet Earth is an 11-episode series, coproduced by the BBC and Discovery Channel. It took five years and millions of dollars to create. Monday night we watched a snow leopard that was captured in the wild for the very first time. Then we watched strange and beautiful fish living in the deep ocean. Sigourney Weaver is narrating, and the whole bloody thing is shot in high-def.
The series has been touted as a "multimedia experience," so naturally I was looking forward to the same level of innovation online.
I went first to the BBC's site, and I got most of what I expected. I often say that the BBC has the best online news site in the world, and Planet Earth certainly reflects that. There are interactive maps, lots of background on animals - the breadth of information is as fierce as the leopards we saw on the show. My only disappointment came when I realized that some of the streaming video is restricted to UK visitors only because of bandwidth allocations and because the BBC is funded as a public trust.
I went to the US site next, and I was completely blown away by the opening screen. It's gorgeous with what seems like pages and pages of content. The interface is slick, and I instantly thought I'd be spending the next several hours exploring Planet Earth digital.
Then I started clicking. That stunning landing page is just a cover - all of the other pages are disjointed and designed to fit with the main Discovery page templates. The experience reminded me of walking into a bakery because of a rich, delicious smell...only to take a bite into a disappointing, subpar baguette.
Interesting, though, that both sites had the same content to work with - and finished with dramatically different results.
Seed Newsvine