Thanks for covering that.

I think you gave the question of public access to public content a sense of perspective, since it's easy to forget in the U.S. that the BBC is a publicly owned corporation. I wrote a fairly lengthy entry using what the BBC will be doing as a jumping-off point for what could be done in the U.S.

Oops. You're right about Jewel in the Crown.

BBC sales of programmes pulled in profits of 123million UKP last year. The licence fee brings in 2.6 billion. Even if it all went away (and remember, the rights won't be for commercial use), that's less than 5% of revenue.

The Royal Canadian Air Farce puts episodes online?

http://www.airfarce.com/

is currently showing a 'congratulations on installing Apache' page. So much for being entertained by free content.

If they release it as free content, they may lose a part of their revenues.

I know what you mean, but personally I'm not overly worried. As long as TV survives, the BBC still ought to be able to sell its programmes abroad. Canal+ isn't going to start broadcasting the downloaded versions: low-quality, and highly illegal. So if they want to put good-quality programming together, they can act as a filter like many other broadcasters.

This is insanely cool. I want to have Greg Dyke's babies.

Regarding this possibly damaging their licensing abroad -- I can't see that happening, since 99.999% of people don't *want* to watch programmes on their PC; there'll always be a market for them to sell on programmes to third-party networks abroad to broadcast. And as Alan Connor points out, a third-party network that broadcasts the 'net version will breach the licensing terms.

Yes, the BBC crew was brought to the Archive by Larry Lessig and we showed how inexpensive it can be and how we have dealt with the ego's and restrictions issues that always come up.

I dont know what role we played, but their decision is fantastic and hopefully trendsetting.

The print publishers made it possible to directly reference old news papers and magazines by posting on the net... Now I hope this goes for moving image collections.

As peter lyman said "the amazing thing of the web is that now, knowledge has an address".

amen.

thank you bbc.

-brewster
brewster@archive.org
Digital Librarian
Internet Archive

I've only just read about this and I'm so insanely excited about it that I can hardly get my thoughts in order. I'm sure new things will keep coming all the time but for the moment here are some thoughts...

The first and most selfish, I get to see all those old programs again. I can see Kenny Everett again and again and again. All those Royal Institute Christmas Lectures that each year I religiously miss, I get to see them. Every single interview with Douglas Adams I can find. To be able to go and look through all the old episodes of Tomorrow's World and recap on all the things that were supposed to be around in the year 2000, are we Post Future yet? That was the first me-me-me thought that went through my head.

Next, I'm planning on homeschooling, my daughter is only 16 months so that gives the BBC plenty of time to sort things out. Now Encarta is all well and good but if we suddenly decide to do a project about Whales it'd be really nice if we just popped to the BBC website a pulled up a list of every program they've ever made about Whales. I really hope they have some good metadate going on, something like the Dublin Core would be great so we can actually find stuff!

For education and schools it'd be an amazing resource. You want to do an A-Level (17-18 yr olds) project about the miners strike, don't worry about text books, go right to the on-the-spot news reports. Pop Media Studies:- The Old Grey Whistle Test, need I say more? Social Studies looking back at the 50s, 60s, 70s etc. easy. University is going to be really easy now!

Finially from the left B3ta side of my brain. The chance to "remix" and reinvent old TV programs. It'll be like the computer games mod scene. Sure there'll be some very basic tweeks of old Dr Who episodes but I'm sure some teams will come up with totally redubbed versions with new monsters rendered in over the top. Fanfiction can go to a whole new level, Dr Who meets Blakes 7 crossover stories?... yes.

I am willing to bet here and now that the following happens...

Stage 1. Some people start to badly re-engineer Dr Who.
Stage 2. The good people get together.
Stage 3. Good "new" episodes of Dr Who start to hit the internet.
Stage 4. Other programs get redubbed and remix.
Stage 5. The BBC start to show these new versions in a new series called "BBC Redux".
Stage 6. These remixes become more popular than new programs.
Stage 7. The teams of "remixers" become paid professionals.
Stage 8. The old "professionals" throw up thier hands in confusion as they just don't get it.
Stage 9. Advertising and Marketing scramble to package this new rebellion and sell it back to us.
Stage 10. TV eats itself.

The BBC News website might be guilty of some misreporting here. According to the transcript of Greg Dyke's speech, he said:

"We intend to allow parts of our programmes, where we own the rights, to be available to anyone in the UK to download so long as they don't use them for commercial purposes."

Danny's figures on the percentage of BBC revenue gained from video sales are pretty interesting reading though...

That's an amazingly perceptive piece, thanks Danny.

It is actually already possible to show BBC content at not-for-profit screenings. But...

1. you have to find a nice secretary with time on their hands who'll sort it all out for you
2. the paperwork is startling
3. you have to clear it with the writer
4. you have to clear it with the Worldwide non-profit screenings department, which is one very overworked man who is almost impossible to track down and requires an awful lot of gentle patting...

So, this is amazing, but I can't see my dear employer getting its behemoth of paperwork sorted to make this work any time soon.

The rights issues are going to be incredibly complex. At present, there's a blanket agreement that allows minute clips. But what if a show contains third party copyright? A picture of a picasso painting, or more than 30 seconds of music, for example? There are going to be a huge number of exceptions.

On the bright side, it might mean that us BBCi folks get decent rights support - contracts for online use might take less than 8 months to write...

A couple of thoughts from the top of my head...

#1 - Rights
As Kim alluded to, rights are a big issue for any broadcaster. As part of the original contract for any fictional work, the writers and stars would have agreed to lease their work (performance) for certain specified areas. Thus, every time a work is re-shown on TV or released on DVD, the stars get a few quid through the post. All-rights all-media contracts weren't around in those days, so that means that everyone involved in an original performance would have to be re-contacted, and the rights re-negotiated.

Where this could become another problem is that there are no standard rates for Internet distribution (eg we'll pay you 25% on top for the P2P distribution rights to the performance), so people can easily make demands that have no relation to the value of the work in question, and that can kill it dead in the water.

Some other questions on rights:

- how much does internet distribution diminish the value of current distribution (eg DVD sales)?
- do degraded copies lower current distribution by a set amount? (eg if I can get a small-screen copy in dodg-o-sound for free via P2P, how many people will not buy the DVD, and how many people would do having seen the value of the content that wouldn't buy it otherwise?)

Note that I'm looking at this from the actors/writers point of view, *not* that of the audience/broadcaster.

#2 - Distribution Costs
Distributing video over the Internet directly from a server sucks. Bandwidth is not infinite, and any straight-line distribution would hit the servers to the point where the licence fee couldn't fund them.

The only solution I can see here is a peer-to-peer network. To avoid porn/libel/etc issues, you could make this BBC-content-only. The method I'm thinking for this would be something along the line of each file having a checksum held on a central BBC server. Before downloading, the client looks the filename up on the authenticating server, looks at the checksum, and if they match then the client knows that all of the content has been rights-cleared.

So, no more pay-for content on the web. Does that mean I don't have to pay my license fee any more? Or does it mean that I will have to pay extra to have bbc repeats of sport, Benny Hill and soap operas beamed around the globe?

Thanks Rob though for pointing out BBC's misreporting of itself. Appalling behaviour. Why can the BBC do no wrong in the bloggers eyes?

Well let's just hope the Tories don't get in, as they seem to want to close down the whole of the BBCi website!

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/media/story...123,1029611,00.html

I blogged about this here:
http://epeus.blogspot.com/2003_08_01_epeus...#106183058149289667

The beeb will still need to work out some form of clearance model for residuals and so on. They can perhaps argue it as promotion; it is tricky.

Also, I doubt much of OGWT survived the VT archive cockup.

yxpx: re-read the piece. Firstly, the nature of the distribution means that if it's given away for free, the cost of "beaming this stuff around" drops considerably. Or do you think that the RIAA has to pay the big bucks to get its artists onto the Kazaa network?

Second: this is what the licence fee is for. You're not paying for compulsory version of Sky. You're paying for a public good. And once you've paid for it, it doesn't cost anything more to spread it a little further. It's part of the brief of the BBC to disseminate their work: remember the whole "nation will speak unto nation"?

No, you may disagree with that principle. Hell, there are people who believe that taxes shouldn't go on schools or roads or the police or high court judges. But you shouldn't be surprised if a lot of people disagree with you - that's why you're still paying, after all. If a majority of your licence paying compatriots thought it was a bad idea, you'd vote in someone who would stop it.

Fourthly, the BBC hardly had an agenda to misreport itself. The speech Dyke gave was ambiguous on this point, and the BBC doesn't gain anything by making a big song and dance about something it's not actually going to do. I think you put down to evil conspiracy something that could better be exoplained by less-than-perfect reporting.

You might want to ask, as well, why none of this is being covered in the Murdoch press. You might want to ask *me* about this, given that I write occasionally for Newscorp newspapers.

Fifthly, can the BBC do no wrong in "the bloggers" eyes? I think you may be hanging out in the wrong blog neighbourhood. Try instapundit, or littlegreenfootballs or samizdata for blogs that believe that the BBC can do almost nothing *but* wrong.

Pigeonholing all bloggers with the same point of view seems to me to be railing against those people who write in their diaries with pencils not pens. Communists the lot of them, I hear.

Edited by author 08-27-2003 11:11 AM
Danny may be reading a little too much into use of the word creative, given that the BBC's vision statement is "to be the most creative organisation in the world". The term is also used as a balance sheet item in the Annual Report - the only organisation in the world where "creative" and "accounting" seem happy together on the balance sheet. Check out the PDF Annual Report and search on the word creative.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/info/report2003/pdf/report_full.pdf

So maybe the BBC is not so willing to swallow Lessig's lessons, but is more keen to be seen to be justifying its huge spending of public money on BBCi.

I completely agree with what you say about needing the bold vision. But we need to be truthful about where we're coming from in order to make the journey clear.

At the moment, the public *don't* own the output of the BBC. The BBC procure a limited licence for them, that being the most cost-effective thing to do based on the needs at the time and the funding available. (e.g. a reshowing with signing and subtitles late at night for free. Up to 1 minute per programme can be reused for promotion. That sort of thing)

If the point of the BBC is now to make things for the public to own, that's going to have an effect on the things that they make. (Or it certainly will if the funding stays the same - perhaps that's the next chapter).

I don't think they should shy away from that, but for this to happen I think we need to make sure we're polemically pushing behind them, not at an angle. As you'll remember from your O-level physics, you're just wasting load of effort that way...

And as I've just started considering the BBC as a shopping trolley of content, complete with wobbly wheels, I'd better stop.