Eco-friendly television

In the world’s current climate (pun intended), it wouldn’t take long before the potential of environmentally friendly television programmes was fully explored. Enter green.tv, a UK-based broadband TV channel wholly dedicated to ecologically-minded short films.

The initiative is unique: for the first time, environmental organisations ranging from Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth to Water Aid and the United Nations Environment Programme, as well as independent film-makers, have a platform to showcase their productions. We spoke to Mike Lamond, development director at green.tv, to learn more.

Can you tell us how the idea to set up green.tv came about?

The company behind it, a film production/multimedia agency called largeblue, had been producing films for about five or six years for a large number of NGOs and government bodies, and they tended to have an environmental [slant]. We realised that a lot of the films we were making for people were being shown on TV or used by companies for one-off occasions and never being seen again. And we also realised that a lot of them had very strong messages that were as viable now as they were when they were being made. People like Greenpeace make a lot of films, a number of which we worked with them on, and once they’ve been used they never get seen again. What we wanted to do was give them a larger platform so that people could have a look at them whenever they wanted to, and I don’t mean just people in the UK – it’s a global platform where people can actively go and look at those films and take action from them.

How does your partnership with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) work?

We (largeblue) had done some work with them and now we have a content partnership. We carry on doing work with them, but we also give them a platform for their films – they have their own channel on green.tv, which they populate with their own productions. But also, from our point of view, they actively promote green.tv. UNEP have a link from their website to ours as well. I think that originally their website didn’t have video functionality, and obviously green.tv has that, so people can watch the films there. And [this partnership] has obviously opened a lot of doors for us and enabled us to speak to other green organisations with the security of knowing that we have a relationship with UNEP. It adds a lot of credibility to our service. The most important thing, of course, is that we have a lot of good content from them.

Do you plan to open green.tv up for user-generated content?

Yes. It’s very interesting that you should say that. A lot of people have described green.tv as “the green YouTube”, and that’s not fair at the moment because we don’t have that user-generated availability. But hopefully that will happen in the next six weeks – we got a grant from a foundation to develop that side of the site, so it’s a functionality that we’ll have up in the near future. We think it’s going to be brilliant because there’s so much grassroots environmental work happening, not just in the UK but worldwide. I think that what’s needed is a network for people to say, “Look what we’re doing, why aren’t you doing that as well? Here are some ideas that are really making a difference”, and allow people to pass on their experiences. Increasingly we see that audiences have so much access to technology anyway that they can quite easily create good quality films themselves and get them up on the site. Hopefully, what we’ll be able to do is again provide them with a wider platform.

What are audiences looking like at the moment?

We are currently getting 800,000 page impressions a month. We’ve getting about 160,000 visits per month as well, and it’s incredible that every one of those 160,000 lasts 13 minutes. So when we get the audience there, it’s a nice, attentive audience that will look at around three or four films. The golden rule is that none of our films lasts more than five minutes, and that’s again a whole part of the philosophy of internet TV. People actively choose to watch those films and they’ll react to them as well – but they have to be really short, hard-hitting, information-led pieces of footage. Our trafiic has been increasing month on month, at the moment at a rate of ten per cent. Unique visits are looking at between 40,000 and 60,000 per month. It is looking healthy and obviously we’d love to grow that – we are looking to increase our links with other like-minded sites and other partners. Our Google search rank is seventh, which is better than pretty much most other environmental sites; there’s only a couple that are higher-ranked than us.

What other plans do you have for green.tv in the near future?

User-generated content is one of many things. We’re looking into launching a shopping channel: the basic premise behind that is something like a green QVC. There are a lot of new businesses – and a lot of established businesses as well, I have to say – that have a very strong staple of green products and perhaps need a forum to reach a large green-interested audience, and we can deliver that to them. We are also looking at redesigning the station itself. At the moment we very much led the way and developed the technology behind green.tv ourselves, but the TV screen is in fact quite small. We don’t usually watch TV on small screens, and yet it seems that on the internet people watch it on smaller screens. The new platform will have a much larger screen. Some of the films we have on green.tv are beautiful, and hopefully by having a larger screen we’ll do the films even more justice. So there’s going to be quite a radical overhaul of the look of the site.

"We’re putting up probably about five new films a week and we would love to put more up – currently our constraints are financial more than anything, but hopefully as we grow it’ll be easier to do that."

Other than that, we want to put more content onto the site, and we want to develop our relationships with more and more green organisations. At the moment we have around 300 films on the site. We’re putting up probably about five new films a week and we would love to put more up – currently our constraints are financial more than anything, but hopefully as we grow it’ll be easier to do that. And the other side of it is obviously to develop more links – we now have 90 people who have contributed videos to green.tv and we’d love to have even more organisations there.

The biggest news is that we’re launching two different language versions: a German version and a Japanese version. We also set up something called ‘The green.tv Foundation’ and hopefully we’ll be launching different versions for different countries.

You’ve read it. Now review it.

Back to top

Back to top