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E4 embraces web 2.0 audience
Case study: How the Channel 4's teen channel put its mind to building a community website...

By Tim Ferguson

Published: Thursday 31 July 2008

Channel 4's entertainment channel, E4, has overhauled its website to make it more web 2.0 friendly.

Launched late last year, the new version of E4.com now incorporates user generated content, blogs and competitions to allow its audience to interact with their favourite programmes.

E4 decided to upgrade its website at the beginning of 2007 and, once web developer ThoughtWorks was selected, started a six month project to build the site that went live just before Christmas.

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Speaking to silicon.com, E4.com business manager, James Tatam, said: "We decided to do this because [E4's] audience is spending a lot more of their time, effort and energy consuming entertainment on the internet as well as from TV. So we felt that strategically we needed to follow our audience onto these new platforms."

He added: "We felt there was an opportunity commercially - and certainly in terms of the brand - to extend what E4 meant in the marketplace to its audience, away from just being a provider of great TV to being a provider of great entertainment whichever platform you happen to be sitting in front of."

The decision to make the site more community focused came after an experiment with MySpace around teen drama Skins, where characters communicated with the audience through their profiles.

Tatam said: "[The Skins experiment] made the TV industry sort of sit up and take notice. Building on that success we felt that there was an opportunity to strengthen the relationship our audience has with E4 through the web by building a site that would be much more engaging, much more flexible and much more playful than the traditional TV-based website."

The new website added several features that Tatam said makes it different from "the normal run-of-the mill TV site" with the main focus on how to integrate user generated content more effectively.

"We did acknowledge that our audience is very active in generating user generated content and that it's also a great way to get a community to coalesce around a site," Tatam explained.

User participation takes the form of editorially set challenges where people are invited to send in pictures or comments. ThoughtWorks built a workflow and process engine to make this easier.

The site also incorporates and links to different microsites for individual programmes where a combination of photos, video, blogging tools and articles are available.

Unlike many TV sites, the E4 site is also able to dynamically highlight content on the front page to show what areas are new or most popular.

As project manager, Tatam found the agile development approach beneficial.

He said: "As the business owner it was a fantastic process. I had so much visibility about what was going on that I could make decisions and remake decisions understanding the consequences of that almost in real time as the project went on. I don't think we would have ended up with anything as near as powerful had we not had that process to build it."

E4 is now working with a ThoughtWorks team based in Bangalore in India to develop a new section of Flash-based games for the site as well as general upgrades to improve its usability.