Tate Media
Digital media are an increasingly important channel for inspiring, challenging and engaging with audiences.
Tate Online
Tate’s website – Tate Online – provides a fifth venue where visitors throughout the world can engage with and enjoy Tate. The site has grown rapidly and is now the leading museum website in the country, with more than 1.5 million unique visitors per month.
Tate Online provides details of the programmes at each of the gallery sites, including rich microsites supporting each of the main exhibitions. You can watch films of artists talking about art. You can also view Tate Collection online or learn about Tate’s history and organisation.
Online Communities
Our website also contains a number of special sections with content aimed at specific needs and interest groups.
These online communities include Tate Kids, aimed at children aged 5 to 12 years old; Young Tate, a youth art initiative run by young adults for young adults; and the Learn Online section, which enables people of all ages to use Tate’s rich multimedia content to explore their interest in visual art.
Our aim going forward is to improve the experience of visitors to our website, by upgrading the design of the site, digitising more of our Collection and archive, and developing further online communities to promote dialogue on our own site and across the web.
Partnerships
Our own site is not the only place you can find us online. We are always adding to the ways audiences can access our content, for example our podcasts can be downloaded for free from iTunes.
Tate’s Media department pioneers a number of innovative collaborations around content and audiences and we plan to build upon these in the coming years.
Examples include Apple, on a range of multimedia tour guides as well as iTunes; Google, on its Street View initiative; and Flickr, enabling members of the public to submit their own photos to our Street and Studio photography exhibition in 2008.
Multimedia
Tate also produces a wide range of rich media content, for example TateShots, a monthly series of short films shot and produced in-house for our website. In 2008, we produced our first feature-length film, which aired on ITV’s South Bank Show, along with a series of short films – 3 Minute Wonders – broadcast on Channel 4.
The rich media that Tate Media produces has enhanced the depth of content available online and we plan to look at ways of extending this activity online and through film and broadcast media.