In February 2008 the BBC sent technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones to the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona with a two-man team — himself and Peter Page on camera, sound and editing — filing for television, radio and online from one trip. Given the subject, it was a fitting place to test a phone as a newsgathering tool. The handset was a Nokia N95, which Reuters was also testing.
What made the experiment notable was not the hardware but that it was conceived from the start as multiplatform. Cellan-Jones filed polished television pieces, radio reports, mobile video for the blog and stories for BBCNews.com. The technology team called it The Mobile Future; Cellan-Jones called it wobblevision.
His own verdict was that mobile video was not there to replace a professionally edited television piece: “Material shot on a mobile phone will never replace the real thing.” It did let a reporter gather quick visual fragments, and the weakest link was audio: the N95’s built-in microphone was the first thing he would improve. Steve Herrmann, then editor of the BBC news website, called the footage rough by broadcast standards but credited it with immediacy.
The distinction drawn was between choosing the most suitable way to tell a story and moving material from one medium into another. Short mobile clips captured an aspect of a story and worked well online, where a television report added little. The next test was already booked, with technology editor Darren Waters due to record on an N95 at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.