Hull Digital Challenge: STREAM
Published Tuesday, April 10, 2007 - 13:02
Hull City Council discusses its digital challenge bid "Stream" and highlights how the project is already helping transform public services while ensuring social and digital inclusion
No other city in the UK is offering the same kind of service being delivered in Hull through STREAM . This video-rich, on demand and easy to use service, offered through broadband, PC, TV via a set-top box or mobile phone, will be delivered to every resident in three wards in the city – to 12,000 households.
It offers a unique way of accessing and interacting with a range of other services at a time and place to suit residents. The system has been designed to be inclusive and the three wards in East Hull have been selected as a high proportion of residents fall into socially excluded groups. The combination of factors leading to social exclusion in this area of Hull is typical, and includes high unemployment, family breakdown, poor academic attainment, crime and lack of basic skills.
However, STREAM, is not just for the socially or digitally excluded - it’s for everyone. The use of TV ensures that those who do not have PCs are included, and enables more people to access the services offered, with ease. And the service will be tailored so that those with greater needs get more out of it. Importantly, STREAM will address the needs of the socially and digitally excluded without stigmatising them.
Hull’s Digital Challenge bid is built on experience, and expands upon existing STREA M services already being delivered in Hull. Hull is the home of Internet Protocol Television (IPTV). The world’s first commercial service was launched in the city in 1999. The STREAM project has on board over 30 years’ experience in IPTV technology. Today, through STREAM, Hull has an IPTV platform that is tried and tested, and replicable anywhere in the country.
STREAM is already delivering service transformation, by changing the way teaching and learning happens in schools (Learning Stream) and by the way small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) access business support services (Business Stream). Through the Digital Challenge we hope to expand this.
Whereas ‘digital switchover’ currently seems to be considered a burden, we see it as an exciting opportunity to transform service delivery and reach excluded people. STREAM will create the business model for local authorities to become involved in and benefit from this transition, creating specific and measurable benefits for citizens and public service providers. In other words, digital switchover can become a driver for service transformation in the UK.
STREAM is not a ‘brush-up’ of existing ways of delivering services. It’s putting end- users and their needs and preferences at the very heart of service delivery. This makes it truly transformative and gives customers the ability to become creators as well as consumers of services, applying the tools of the Internet revolution to public services. Service-users are given the tools to become actively involved if they wish. STREAM creates a Service Laboratory that brings together citizens, service providers, businesses and technologies to find ways to achieve outcomes set by the citizens. It is, in short, Double Devolution in action.
If Hull wins the Challenge it will allow us to add additional services to STREAM - reaching out to communities in one of the most deprived areas of the country to engage and inform them on areas like creating safer communities, health and social care and other community issues. We will give residents an easy-to-use tool to help them become involved in their local communities. We will give them access to services and content they themselves say they want. We will create business models that can transfer into other service areas, and, importantly, which can be applied anywhere in the UK.
