Working closely with ITV Studios, Bloc were central to the development of the online service, itvWILD. From digital and commercial strategy, to branding, proprietary software development (content tagging system), content digitisation, distribution, web design, build and deployment, we certainly put in the hours on this one!

The result of all this hard-work and unswerving focus was itvWILD, the video site that offered simple access to ITV Studios’ vast natural history archive.

itvWILD.com was developed at Bloc HQ by a crack team of creatives and mad scientists and featured thousands of clips showcasing a vast amount of the animal kingdom.

Bloc’s boffins worked in conjunction with ITV’s zoologists over many months to create the “tree of life”, a large database mapping the complex and surprising web of species on planet earth. We also developed proprietary tagging software, which enabled the ITV zoologists to tag thousands of hours of wildlife footage.

The tagged video was then segmented into short-form video clips, before being prepared for video streaming via the custom built itvWILD Video on Demand player.

And finally a custom built search engine retrieved and sorted the video content before delivering it to the player for continuous playback.

The end result enabled users to search thousands of clips of video featuring countless species. A search term could be as simple as a species name or a type of animal, but users could also search themes (eg pretty, cute, ugly), locations (eg country, habitat, National Park), behaviours (eg hunting, nesting) – and anything else you could think of!

To top it all off we built a fully interactive studio-based online game show starring a couple of CITV’s finest children’s presenters! The multiplayer, Facebook integrated online trivia quiz, the World’s Wildest Quiz, kept the whole family entertained for hours as they tested their knowledge of planet earth in the wildest quiz in the world!

Bloc’s CEO and founder, Rick Palmer, said “Working with ITV Studios on such an important and valuable asset was a real privilege and testament to my team’s creativity, professionalism and digital expertise. The result was something we’re immensely proud of.”

Sadly the website is no longer online, due to a wider commercial strategy at ITV.