Closing down to start up

This week we closed our channel player, having run it in ‘Beta’ mode since March. This might seem like a strange way to move forward but bear with me!

This first incarnation of Outdoors TV has been run as a test bed for future programmes that will go into production in the New Year. With the public launch scheduled for May 2009, we’re now closing down the test operation in order fully to prepare the channel for its post launch life.

The funny thing is that in closing the player, we’ve gained a good snapshot of the overall interest shown in Outdoors TV & its programmes. We’ve had nothing but good feedback on the content we’ve shown so far, but we’ve tended to look solely at the performance of a particular programme, rather than the bigger picture.

Now, we have a ‘closing balance’ if you like & have discovered that we’ve had over 14,500 viewings in the last nine months. Depending on your perspective, this is either a significant or derisory sum but, for us, it is confirmation that there are people out there who want to watch what we want to produce.

OK, so fourteen & a half thousand views in nine months is nothing compared to You Tube or the BBC, but considering that these figures were achieved with nothing more than a bit of word of mouth publicity through the people & organisations we filmed during production, I think that’s a reasonable bit of market research!

It’s also funny how you tend to look at something differently if you are finishing it for good. Because this was the final set of statistics we looked more carefully at the overall picture, rather than how each individual programme was performing.

While it feels really quite negative, closing the very player that has defined the channel until now, this is simply a transformation. We’re not closing the channel, just changing the way people will watch our programmes (hopefully for the better). This is not the end but the beginning of the final incarnation of Outdoors TV that will be launched to the wider world in about six months.

This will be the last blog entry until the second week of January, when the build up to the channel’s launch will begin in earnest.