The archives are huge, and full of odd stuff, but there are huge gaps due to the lost videotape years.
late 60s to late 70s are mostly gone.

I wonder what format they're planning to use. The BBC seems pretty technically clueful, so hopefully they'll use a standard format; by the time this project ramps up H.264 will probably be available.

Tropical: it's really an either/or. If the BBC could make money selling their back-catalogue, they would. They already have the infrastructure to do that. It wouldn't be cost-effective though: by the time you factor in all the costs of replication, distribution, copy protection, preventing piracy, billing, paying, etc, you'd be making a loss.

Giving it all away avoids that. You pay a minimum for distribution (P2P networks, technology like bittorrent, friends sharing files will cope with the bulk of your distribution needs). People get the material they want. The BBC gets the biggest branding boost you can imagine.

Think of it this way: there are a bunch of films and TV shows that you'd gladly pay the BBC for now. Don't you think that there are many, many more that you don't know about now - but which will get exposed by this initiative. And that once the BBC notice that people are excited and doownloading this, won't exploit in exactly the way you describe, packaging and reselling in a way that *will* bring them money?

The problem with commercial ventures with the BBC archive is that it's a high-risk process: which titles should you try and sell? The Creative Archive provides an outlet for all the material which *might* not sell - and gives feedback to the commercial wing to which shows are exploitable.

For bandwidth reasons alone, I can't imagine them giving away
high-quality copies for free. It is also clear that this is
not going to be public domain, since it is only "free and
available to everyone, as long as they were not intending to
use the material for commercial purposes." So that will
still allow licensing fees to be collected for TV/DVD/etc use.

Now if only they'd make new episodes of Doctor Who....

Get it now before the British government kills off the BBC, and replaces it with Fox UK, or something else that can be bought off easily by crooked politicians...

Gerry Anderson's stuff, and The Prisoner, might not be BBC properties!

As I recall, they were by an outfit with a name like "ITC." Big logo at the end of the show.

I understand the argument of wanting to re-invest, but there is also a deep coolness and great karma in opening up those vaults. "Thanks for making this possible with your past fees; keep paying them and you'll see even more cool stuff!"

Danny, sorry I didn't make myself clear. It's not that I want to pay twice, I consider the license fee to be a subscription for a year's worth of broadcasting.

I'd like to see more investment going into film making and broadcasting to sow the seeds for tomorrow's BBC.

Moof - BBC World brings in less than 5% of the licence fee (123million versus 2.7 billion, according to the annual report). Even if all that profit went away at once (which is unlikely - are you saying you never buy a CD or a DVD of something you listen to or see online?), it wouldn't make a dent compared to the BBC's main source of income.

Tropical - out of interest, why? As a former licence payer, why do you want to pay twice?

As a former license payer, I'd rather see the BBC's back-catalogue being sold for profit, with the profit being re-invested into the corporation. Hell, why not reduce the license fee or invest the money in film funding instead?

Somehow, I don't expect that suddenly EVERYTHING will be online.. You see, the BBC is funded by license fees. But also by the hugely succesful enterprice called BBC World, which exploits their current products and backcatalogue; it's responsible for DVDs, as well as selling shows to foreign networks. I don't see any resolution as to how the Beeb will make up for lost income from this enterprise if they give everything away..

Anyone know of a handy guide to what we can expect? It seems to me most of the cool fantasy shows of the 60s and 70s were by ITV. (Prisoner, Gerry Anderson, Strange Report, The Champions, Avengers, Secret Agent Man etc.)

Edited by author 08-24-2003 05:41 PM
Damn, I just bought the Hitchhiker's Guide box set, and I have all the Dr. Who dvds released thus far.

I imagine the videos won't be dvd quality, but I'll just buy my favorites and download the rest. :)

Among many other things I think that means every
episode of Doctor Who and the Hitchhiker's Guide
to the Galaxy. Wow.

Excellent! No more waiting for Blake's 7 on DVD ;-)

More seriously, does anybody know what kind of quality they're planning on offering?