Introducing Amnesty TV

Amnesty International UK has just launched Amnesty TV, an online factual entertainment platform designed to humanise activism and inspire a mass audience to stand up for human rights. Its launch coincides with Amnesty's 50th anniversary and marks the natural next step in the evolution of campaigning and activism.

Amnesty is a longtime client of ours. In 2008 we created Protect The Human and we've had an ongoing role shaping Amnesty's social media strategy. Amnesty is the kind of organisation we're really proud to work with and we were thrilled to be asked to deliver the platform for Amnesty TV. 

Amnesty TV is a unique platform for a unique kind of content. Each episode offers a bit of humour as well as news, campaign information and background facts. Humour isn't new to Amnesty: anyone who experienced The Secret Policeman's Ball knows the organisation has a tradition of balancing the serious business of human rights with comedy and light-hearted discussion. You can expect more of that on Amnesty TV.

Amnesty produces each episode in-house, so we focused on creating the best possible way to showcase them. After exploring different ways of displaying content and engaging people, we pinned down three priorities that had to be addressed in order to make this project really come to life.  

1. Anthony Burrill's visual language

Normally our role would include defining a visual language, but in this case we already had one. Anthony Burrill designed the icons and titles that correspond with the different episode segments – news, the facts, campaigns, mischief and perspective – and our work needed to support and complement these.

We felt that that a user landing on the site for the first time might need to be introduced to the visual language, rather than just leaping straight in. So on the home and landing pages, we use titles alone, and then as users get deeper into the site we begin to introduce Burrill's beautiful icons.

2. Low fuss watching

Above all else, Amnesty TV had to be easy to engage with. On the one hand, this meant bringing the video to the forefront and not having too much else happening on the page. But on the other, we needed to make it easy for people to get involved: after all, the purpose of Amnesty TV is to inspire awareness and action around Amnesty's campaigns. So we had to make it easy to comment, see related content, download podcasts and engage with campaigns. 

3. Intuitive video player controls

This is quite a lovely feature of the site. Not every episode will contain the five main segments – news, the facts, campaigns, mischief and perspective – so the player is flexible. It is built in such a way that the visual representation of the segment in the player bar (scrubber, to you in the know) reflects its length within the episode. (For example, a short news segment is indicated by a smaller illustration.) This shows users what to expect from each episode, and it lets them skip between segments as they watch.

This was a fun project with a special client. We'll be keeping a close eye on what happens on Amnesty TV!