C4 launches cross-platform education projects

by Fiona Ramsay, Media Week 29-Apr-08, 14:55

LONDON - Channel 4 has unveiled the first of its new cross-platform education properties aimed at 14-19 year olds as its moves its £6m schools programming budget into new media.

Head of education Janey Walker said Channel 4 needed to "increase access" to its educational content with new partners working on participative projects for teens outside of school hours. "We don't want to just do TV with an add-on online," she said.

The broadcaster has teamed up with social network My Space as its exclusive social network partner for cross-platform projects Year Dot and Insiders, developed by digital marketing agency Holler.

Starting in June, Year Dot will follow 15 young people for a year, looking at how they use social networking to achieve their ambitions. Insiders is a scripted comedy project which will follow six professionals as they blog about their working lives.

Commissioning editor Matt Locke said the social networking deals were not designed to be significant revenue generators but were providing exclusive content in exchange for promotion online.

"We are trying to invest in places online where projects can live longer than Channel 4 can support them in broadcast," he said. "We could fund the projects for a fixed time but the ripples can continue across the web for some time."

Battlefront, a new project for TV and online this autumn, will follow 20 teen activists in their personal campaigns over nine months. The cross-platform project has been commissioned by Raw Television.

For the Autumn morning schedule, Channel 4 has commissioned Tern Television to produce a ten-part series called KNTV Sex, which will use CGI and real-life footage to tackle sex education using the characters of Kierky and Nietzsche from the fictional country of Slabovia. Teens will be encouraged to upload their own ‘Slabovian' content to the internet, to help them discover educational topics such as science.

Channel 4 has also invested in start-up website Schoolofeverything.com, which links students and teachers together. Channel 4 aims to produce four projects over the next year with the site.

Channel 4 is also supporting its new peak time series Embarrassing Bodies, which drew in 2.9m viewers last night, with a new long-term website offering bespoke information about health conditions.