• by Sara Guaglione , January 16, 2018

BBC Ideas, a digital service targeting 25- to 55-year-olds with a focus on short, factual videos, is live.

BBC first teased the service in 2015.

BBC Ideas will publish new video playlists with a different theme each week. This week, the playlist is called “Ideas for making the world a better place.” Future curated playlists include visionaries and another on classic psychological experiments and how they apply to today.

Videos range from why people should learn to write Chinese to a survival guide for nuclear war. Most of the videos are under 10 minutes, and the majority are under five.

BBC Ideas will make its own films and pull video from around bbc.co.uk and BBC’s archive, as well as commission production companies and partner with organizations for content.

The service is being overseen by BBC director of radio and education James Purnell, who last year called BBC Ideas the first of a number of projects to “reinvent the BBC for the next generation.”

It will also be run by executive editor Bethan Jinkinson and former BBC Newsnight digital chief Cordelia Hebblethwaite, who is the commissioning editor of BBC Ideas.

In a blog post announcing BBC Ideas going live, Jinkinson wrote the site "aims to be informative, smart and genuinely useful for when you need a little bit of a lunchtime brain-detox. But we also want BBC Ideas to be entertaining. So much more rewarding than stalking your ex’s ex’s ex on Facebook. But not quite up there with 2017’s most challenging political biographies.”

Last summer, BBC Ideas' product lead, Lloyd Shepherd, noted in a blog post that like many online publishers, the BBC "noticed a definite trend in recent years—people seeking out and sharing particularly interesting things, often in quite a random way.

“Our task was this: How to assemble a BBC proposition that was entertaining and informative and, above all, ‘particularly interesting?' ”

While much this type of content is already available online by the BBC, Shepherd said it was “quite hard to find." There was "no simple way for a user to say, right, BBC—show me something interesting. I’ve got 10 minutes to fill. It can be about pretty much anything, as long as it’s interesting.”

Shepherd said the BBC believes viewers want video content to be interesting, fast, short and on mobile.

The service is currently in beta mode; BBC Ideas is testing the playlist format, styles and themes.

“If it works, and people come back for more, we’ll know we’re on to something,”  Jinkinson wrote.