[Sigia-l] BBC

[Adrian Howard]

On Wednesday, August 27, 2003, at 04:37  am, Listera wrote:

> Thoroughly thrashing the notion that nothing new ever comes out of the 
> UK
> :-) BBC is putting its archives and future programming online, free 
> for the
> download:
>
> <http://slate.msn.com/id/2087512/>

There's a nice Guardian article on this at 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,1030176,00.html>.

It should be pointed out that the BBC is not making all of its archives 
and future programming available (although some early reports of Greg 
Dyke's speech did make it sound that way).

A lot of the material the BBC broadcasts cannot be distributed for 
legal reasons. It has various residual rights associated with it (e.g. 
repeat payments to actors). It's unlikely that you'll be seeing Monty 
Python or Life On Earth available for free in the archive.

That said, it still leaves a heck of a lot of content that the BBC does 
have complete rights too. It's going to be impressive if they can carry 
it off.

[snip]
> What I'd like to know is why this bold move, and why now? Has there 
> ever
> been a public discussion of this over there?

Why? I can only guess... a few possible possible reasons:

-	Somebody is finally taking the BBC charter seriously. If you read the 
charter at face value it almost requires the BBC to do this. Their job 
is to inform and entertain the public. Unlike almost all other 
broadcasters they the vast majority of their money from public funding. 
Only about 5% comes form licensing fees.

-	The Creative Commons people have been impressing BBC people for some 
time now.

-	The BBC gets a lot of abuse every year about the licence fee. I can't 
see this harming their public image.

-	It will *really* annoy the commercial broadcasters. The BBC love 
doing this ;-) The announcement will also take some of the wind out the 
sails of people who have been trying to force the BBC to licence their 
content to other UK commercial broadcasters.

Adrian