A small Films fail @BBCiPlayer
John Wyver writes: In the global scheme of things, the concern I want to highlight this morning is little more than a mote. But apart from the irritation it has provoked, it is a small but potentially significant sign of a shift in the relationship between the BBC’s television channels and BBCiPlayer. It also has implications for the discovery of arthouse films on the corporation’s streaming service.
Until recently, on the Films page for iPlayer there was a ‘Sort by’ dropdown menu with the choices ‘Featured’ / ‘A-Z’ / ‘Recent’. Using this you could rearrange the layout of the features on offer, and by clicking on Recent you could find those films that has been broadcast in the past few days.
This menu remains on, for example, the Drama & Soaps page. but as far as I can see it has disappeared from Films. There, now, ‘Featured’ is the only way in which you can access the catalogue on offer. And ‘Featured’ is structured, much like a streaming service index page, with groupings of films under headings that include ‘Spider-Man’, ‘Family Favourites’, ‘Based on a True Story’, ‘Screen Two’ and ‘Wallace and Gromit’s Wacky World’. We are not so far it seems from Borges’ Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge.
One effect of the change is the severing of Films from any acknowledged relation to the broadcast channels. Although of course most of the films appear here for a limited period after a broadcast screening (apart, that is, from a number of RKO titles for which the BBC has a licence in perpetuity), the Films page now appears to be simply a free floating catalogue.
At the same time, it would seem that the new structure buries certain films with little hope of discovery. My example here is Vermiglio, Maura Delpero’s very fine World War Two drama from 2024, with Italian and Ladin dialogue. This Venice Film Festival prize-winner was shown on BBC Four in early June and has ten months to run on iPlayer.
Before the recent change, Vermiglio came up in the chronological Recent listing, but this is no longer a possibility. You can find it on the iPlayer if you put the title into the overall Search box, and while it’s there some way down the menu of ‘Period Drama & Historical Stories’ titles, it’s not in the catch-all ‘War, Westerns & Spies’ category. Nor could I find it on the BBC Four page, apart from in the compendious A-Z listing.
Perhaps this is of little consequence, and of course structuring Discovery for a collection like BBCiPlayer is hard. But given how marginal foreign and arthouse cinema now is from the BBC, clinging by its celluloid fingernails to the late-night reaches of BBC Four, not to have such films highlighted for just a few days in ‘Recent’ feels like another nail in broadcasting’s coffin for creative cinema.
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