Chatting with Kevin Dando of PBS – Part 2: Kevin on Being an Early Adopter
December 9, 2008 :: Steve FisherEveryone has watched a PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) show at one time or another. It might have been to see some live music on Austin City Limits, an episode of Frontline or a Ken Burns documentary. Many of these programs are produced by local PBS stations (i.e. KLRU in Austin, TX, WGBH in Boston, MA) but share a goal of providing high quality programming shared across all PBS affiliate stations. For years they have produced incredible content for everyone but as new technologies have changed they want we consume content, PBS overall had to adopt or fade into irrelevancy.
In the center of all of this is PBS headquarters here at WETA in Arlington, VA is Kevin Dando. I met Kevin about three years ago when we both attended the Interactive portion of the popular South by Southwest (SXSW) conference. He is currently Director, Education and Online Communications at PBS and is helping keep PBS on the cutting edge by promoting the interactive content and, working with others, pushing social media at PBS in the broadest sense.
Recently I was able to catch up with him and talk about how things at PBS have evolved over the last two years and discuss the future of social media and its use in a place like PBS. Here is the transcript of that interview:
Steve: Just like you were a pioneer when High-Definition came online, PBS has been one of the pioneering groups to put its shows online for viewing. How has this particular technology evolved in the last few years? How do you feel it has helped or hurt your brand and TV viewership?
Kevin: We hear anecdotally about how many people have discovered or revisited our programming because it’s been available online on their schedule, and our Web traffic stats bear out the fact that it’s helped people spend more time with our programming.
Both our general audience and kids sites already have hundreds of hours of content available for people to view online, and our Senior V.P. of Interactive, Jason Seiken, made an announcement this past spring about a major initiative which will mean a significantly larger amount of video being made available by the end of the year.
I’ve seen the design for PBS’ expansive new video area, and it’s impressive. We’ve just gone through some focus group testing for it, and the results were encouraging. We’ll be making more announcements about this very soon.
To be continued…
Next Time in Part 3: Kevin on Social Media
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Part 1: Kevin on PBS
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