[Sussex] BBC Video Downloads

[Nic James Ferrier]

"Mark Harrison" <Mark at yourpropertyexpert.com> writes:

> A: For the BBC to allow ALL its material to be distributed freely over the
> Internet, accept a loss in revenue of approximately £625m per year
> (representing material that previously it sold on VHS and DVD), and balance
> the budget by making about 16% fewer programmes.
>
> B: For the BBC to all ALL its material to be distributed freely over the
> Internet, accept a loss in revenue of approximately £625m per year
> (representing material that previously it sold on VHS and DVD), keep
> programming output at the current level, and seek a 20% increase in the
> licence fee to compensate.
>
> C: For the BBC to put in place mechanisms that allow limited download, thus
> preserving the revenue it gets from VHS and DVD.

If the BBC was a subscription company then I would agree with this
analysis. But it isn't - it's a public company paid for through a tax
(yes, I know it's a licence and you can choose not to have a
television - but that's about opting out of culture - even the
Benefits Service accepts that owning a television is not a luxury).

So, given that we've already paid for this content through taxation it
seems unfair to make us pay for it again. The same arguments can be
used against much state owned data: ordance survey maps, etc...

So, in principle, it is wrong. Given that I would have hoped that the
BBC would be a voice for doing the right thing. I didn't expect it but
I did hope.


Encouragingly there do seem to be a lot of people inside the BBC who
get the anti-DRM argument. But disappointingly many of these people
are burying their dislike in order to get the content out.


> Free distribution of software under, say, the GPL [other licences are
> available] works very well, BECAUSE the nature of software makes it easy to
> extend, and putting in place a mechanism that makes it incumbent (under
> certain circumstances) to release those extensions back to the community has
> led to some great collaborative pieces of code - not least of which is
> "Linux" itself.
>
> It is harder to see how the economic benefits of redistribution for
> extension meaningfully apply to, say, movies. YouTube seems full of "mashed"
> examples of where generally the resultant extended version is significantly
> inferior to the original product, and vanishingly few where the extended
> product improves upon the original.

Software had a history of being free to copy. That's why people
noticed when it suddenly wasn't.

But recorded pictures and sound do not have a history of being free
to copy (despite the fact that their unrecorded forms DO have that
history) and so it will take longer to engender a hacker culture
around them.

But it's a pretty poor imagination that can't envisage what you could
do yourself by remixing Blue Planet footage into your own videos or
BBC sound effects into your own sound effects.



Note that there's another alternative to all this: end the BBC's
current public body status and make it a commercial broadcaster. Then
it can do what it likes.


One last point: I would also feel easier if there were proper
oversight of the BBC's accounts. But they won't submit to NAO audit,
claiming it would compromise their editorial independence. That's what
really worries me: in other words, it's a governance issue.


-- 
Nic Ferrier
http://www.tapsellferrier.co.uk   for all your tapsell ferrier needs