Blick TV: Innovative news TV

Since mid-February 2020 Look TV live. I've taken a quick look at it since then and am of the opinion that Ringier is doing a lot of things right with this TV project. Blick TV looks like a classic news channel at first glance, but is quite innovative under the hood.

Continuous stream, replays with regular updates

We know it from Tele Züri: the news program is broadcast live at 6 p.m. and then repeated every hour. Blick TV takes this principle to the extreme: you can't watch Blick TV for longer than 10-15 minutes with a functioning short-term memory, so often the contributions are repeated. But that makes perfect sense: the average useful life will be correspondingly short; The channel has obviously been optimized so that you only watch for a few minutes and start the stream several times a day. Based on my own usage behavior, I see that this calculation definitely works.

At least in concept, Blick TV doesn't seem to think in terms of shows and rigid program hours, but rather individual contributions. If the news situation changes, the introductions are respoken, contributions are updated or thrown out of the program, while other program components remain the same. This creates an always up-to-date stream without anyone having to be in the studio all the time. By the way, you can tell that some of the creators come from the classic TV world because the presenters repeatedly refer to a “focus” show that is not branded anywhere. Internal terms obviously make it into the program here.

Responsive player with auto-subtitling

Very smart: The player is responsive and automatically adapts the image to the device used. The desktop widescreen on the smartphone is not simply reduced or changed to landscape format, but rather a rectangular section is selected. Since the cell phone section is centered, the lower thirds are centered on Blick TV, and when moving the camera, care is taken to ensure that the important image information is in the middle.

Today, subtitling is mandatory for mobile devices, as videos are often consumed without audio. Blick TV therefore subtitles the entire Swiss German program in standard German. According to Ringier, this happens automatically, which is believable given the fairly common errors. A lot was obviously invested in development here and the thinking was consistently customer-centric. The bureaucrats at Leutschenbach would be happy to learn a lesson or two from this.

Particularly interesting for me as a viewer: Normal ad blockers (I use UBlock Origin, which is completely open source) block all forms of advertising... Ringier will definitely make improvements soon, after all, such an expensive project has to be monetized.

Very innovative, but there is still room for improvement

The program scheme and player from Blick TV is very innovative - television has really been rethought here. Nevertheless, there is room for improvement: there is significantly more interactivity in the player. Why aren't widgets like Instagram used, e.g. reviews integrated into the player, Q&A tools or just links to the relevant articles? The need for action has apparently been recognized, Jonas Projer has Announced at the end of Augustthat the player will be improved. It is to be hoped that it is not just the forms of advertising that will be beefed up.

In terms of content, Blick TV is sometimes difficult to bear. In addition to the repetitions already mentioned, the moderators emphasize individual syllables very strangely ("Gggguete Mmmmorge") - apparently they were taught that this sounded particularly professional. Funnily enough, the two most experienced TV presenters stand out particularly negatively among the regular presenters...

The opulent (virtual) studio background also sometimes seems a bit out of place when people are talking about very tabloid topics. Most of the time it doesn't bother me - on the contrary, I like it quite a bit.

Nevertheless, Blick TV is one of the most innovative media experiments in recent years. I'm very excited to see how Blick TV develops and hope that it's not a bad omen the first anchor has already said goodbye to the competition.