Research TV

Research-TV, a non-profit-making broadcasting initiative led by the University of Warwick, could help spread those findings far wider than any spiel at a conference. It aims to revolutionise the communication of science to the public - a government imperative - and even to win researchers pots of money to commercialise their ideas.

Warwick has a broadcast studio on campus and reached an audience of 150 million worldwide with a video news release of Bill Clinton's last presidential speech on globalisation, given at the university in De-cember 2000. From this, the idea grew to set up a pilot to test the potential impact of similar video releases to broadcast research news worldwide.

The pilot was launched in spring last year. Initially, a number of UK universities, along with the Economic and Social Research Council and the Regional Development Agency, were involved. And they found a receptive audience: some 250 million people, among them international opinion leaders, business executives, senior academics, policymakers and the public at large.

Research-TV takes expert opinion on topical issues, new discoveries, newsworthy or unusual research and tailors it into a piece that can be used by news broadcasters. The cost of the package - roughly £8,000 - covers all elements of producing and distributing a television clip.

Institutions using the service get a breakdown of how many broadcasters use the footage as well as monitoring reports. They are then free to use the footage for their own purposes, such as corporate videos or presentations.

After the success of the pilot, Research-TV was launched in January this year with a smaller core of partners, made up of the universities of Birmingham, Durham, King's College London, Nottingham and Warwick, which has overall responsibility for the project. It has been providing newsrooms with research feeds on a fortnightly basis ever since.

It allows universities to spread their research further, explains Chris Coe, director of communications at King's. "New technology provides an international platform for news stories and Research-TV has made use of this to allow us to publicise some of our research to a truly global audience. I guess it reaches parts that traditional PR doesn't reach."

Others are more doubtful - Judith Moore, University College London's media relations manager, for one. "I'd be quite doubtful about how effective it would be," she says. "Most broadcasters want to send along their own cameramen to get the shots that they want. In putting together a broadcast release, you are presenting a picture that they themselves might not want to paint."

Often TV producers put together a news broadcast using generic shots of laboratories, for example, on top of the interviews, rather than spend precious time filming a complete package. For Moore, the Research-TV process sounds too controlling. "Something a PR agency might do for a drugs company," she suggests. Not to mention expensive: "(£8,000) is a massive outlay for any press office and I think there are other, better avenues that reach more people."