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BBC Three as a Platform

BBC Three.

Our documentary is going to be made with BBC Three as the target platform for screening. BBC Three is a popular channel which has moved from broadcast television to being online. This makes our audience more specific and I want to address our platform before making the documentary so that we are able to ensure that it fits into the usual content of BBC Three. 
BBC Three moved to being an online channel in 2015, but is still full of content directed towards 16-34 year olds. 

Audience

BBC Three has a younger target audience at around 16-34. This makes their content quite specific as the channel has a lot of online competition in YouTube and Netflix.
They make themselves unique with content that involves the audience; the documentaries are about young adults, the comedy revolves around young adult characters, and the other tabs involve challenges that young adults are facing head on at that age, such as sexuality, health and wellbeing, and drugs.
In the documentaries, they focus on people with unique stories. They can range from 5 minutes to 60 minutes long, making content available for people with all different kinds of schedules and forms of viewing. They post a lot of their shorter content on Facebook, where people scrolling through videos are likely to find them, whereas their longer content is based mostly on the website. They use social media to promote their content which reaches the right kind of demographic to be interested in their videos.

Content

In BBC Three documentaries, they tell stories of people who have a message to spread, or are going on a journey learning about something new. Generally, the presenter is someone exploring something that they can relate to.
A lot of the documentaries are bringing awareness to taboo topics such as obesity, or crime in London. This informs the viewer about things that not everyone is aware of, but they're worth telling the stories.
It revolves almost entirely around young adults and what they're going through at that age such as becoming an adult and learning about themselves. This attracts the target audience because they want to know about people who are going through the same things they're going through (which adds to learning about themselves, a form of self-acceptance) or learning about people with completely different lives to them, which makes the viewer question their own experiences.
From what I've seen, BBC Three documentaries are about informing and letting young people know about the possibilities they face in life.

Platform

BBC Three is entirely online, which makes it unique to all other BBC channels. It still requires a TV license to watch most of the content that's on the website but they post some films on their social media (mostly Facebook) which attracts in a younger audience and allows the audience to discuss the film in the comments, meaning BBC Three are able to get feedback from their demographic immediately.
As younger audiences are moving their consumption of TV to online with streaming sites such as Netflix, and short content platforms like YouTube, it made sense to move BBC Three to online with it's younger target audience. They have a lot of strong competition but moving it not only to the website but to social media helps them 'spread their net' wider and in turn generating more views and viewers.
Another feature of their content being on social media is that all of their videos on Facebook are subtitled. This isn't just for deaf users. When someone scrolls onto a video on their dashboard, the video will automatically start playing without sound and the user can choose whether to watch with sound or scroll past the post. Having the subtitles allows users to watch the video without the sound first to get an idea of what the video involves, and then they can click the video to watch with sound if they're interested. This also generates more views of their content.

How does our documentary fit in?

We are making our documentary to inform people about the pros and cons of buying a fashionable dog. We want to inform the viewer about the problems that they could face and for people to understand that they need to do a lot of research before just choosing a cute breed, and to also consider adopting before buying. Our documentary will be only 10 minutes so this is acceptable to be used on the same platforms that BBC Three uses, and will likely attract in the same audience because of this, and also because of the content. Most people love dogs and using that as an attraction to watch the documentary will mean that we will be informing while still having a documentary that is fun to watch. Young adults might be looking to get a dog around that age if they've just got their first house and they're settling into a long-term job and relationship, so using this channel as a platform would be reaching the right people. Young adults are also more likely to buy into trends which extends to a trendy dog breed whereas someone who is older and looking for a dog might just choose a dog because of it's activity levels or size which is what should be considered first rather than the dog's appearance. Using myself as a presenter helps the younger viewer to connect with someone of a similar age to them and I am also being educated at the same time as them so they can relate to me about what I'm able to talk about after visiting people/locations. 

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