> In my hallucination, it should take one person within > Auntie's legal department about a month to change the > contracts for content production, add some budget for servers > and bandwidth, to make the biggest change to how the BBC > works since radio gave way to black and white TV.
I reckon many people in the BBC would like to be in your hallucination! Alas the world of legal issues can take months, sometimes years to sort out - one only has to look at the case of BBC7 which had to launch with a limited set of programmes on pretty heavy rotation for several months whilst negotiations took place with various parties which would finally allow the channel to replay the much wider variety of programmes that it does now. And that was mostly programmes made in-house - programmes made by independent production companies are even more problematical. The BBC may pay for a programme from an indie, but the rights it has over a programme are surprisingly limited because the indie has the right to commercially exploit the programme after (IIRC) six months in the UK. And of course there's international sales... It's a huge cultural mindshift across the entire, global industry to make. That's the kind of thing that's going to take time. > I can hear the voices of resistance still. And all that is before you've even got to the public viewpoint - it doesn't take much digging on message boards to find a band of people who are completely opposed to anything that is paid for by the license fee, being made available outside the UK. bbc.co.uk included. And that's an even bigger challenge! Just me 2p's worth :) - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
