BET J Virtual Awards

Traditional media meets new media meets users half-way.  I think that is the best way to describe the BET J’s inaugural Virtual Awards.

Hosted by critically-acclaimed actress Nia Long and comedian Chris Spencer, the “virtual” broadcast will feature red-hot performances from Washington, DC, New York and Atlanta hotspots — all from a stunning, ground-breaking virtual environment.

Currently, there is a a site up for the awards that has a page for the My Time Online contest, where users/potential viewers can upload themselves singing 1 of 5 songs that are currently up for an award.  Those videos will be judged and a winner will be chosen.   The show isn’t scheduled to air until November 25th, so between now and then there are going to be a ton of specials leading up to the ceremony.  On November 25th the show will air on BET J, at 8:00 PM with an encore online broadcast at 10:00 pm.  The winner of the My Time Online contest will also get an award and have their speech aired.

Little Peeves about the actual website for the awards site:

• Lots of broken links so I’d suggest using your back button when your browse
• When you go and view the photo gallery, it reloads the page every time.  I know this is good for getting page views up and trafficking ads, but it is no fun for slow connections.
• The design seems a bit off-balance to me.  There are quite a few pages with a ton of white space and buttons that are larger than they need to be.
• I can’t click on the logo to get back home.

The major thing about the site though, is that they are saying “The BET J VIRTUAL AWARDS perfectly blends the ‘traditional’ awards show with today’s cutting edge technology,” but other than the online rebroadcast, the user submitted videos and the use of a virtual environment I’m not seeing it.  Since this is for music, there are so many opportunities to go and pull videos and put them on the site.  They have the shows leading up to it that they could rebroadcast online as well, or they could go in to their archive and pull out clips about some of the artist and just have a multimedia section.  If they are as concerned about page views as the photo section would have me believe, I would think they would also want to increase average time on site by offering things that will keep people on one page for a few minutes.  There is also a lack of mobile integration.  Some of the most cutting edge and practical ways to get audience more engaged with traditional media is through mobile technologies, especially since the audience does get to vote on the “Best Underground Artist” category.

Overall, this sounds like an interesting endeavor and I am looking forward to checking it out.  I can’t help but wonder if this is a test to see if an awards ceremony like this will be rolled out for the larger awards shows

Airtime is November 25th at 8:00 pm on BET J.