I would love to see the BBC reverse its thinking and engage us, as the public, in allowing much more access, even if they have to pressure government to change the law. There is nothing to fear :-)
oh we know that - honestly, we really do. we're in the business of maximising the value our programmes offer the public, which in many (but not all) cases equates to maximising access to them this principle is accepted, hell, no, it's embraced by the BBC now. but messy reality swiftly intrudes. Our rights holders (the people who actually own the programmes we broadcast), and our regulators / competitors take a bit more persuading ... which takes time, given there can be dozens of different rights holding bodies, and hundreds of individual rights holders in just one programme. And other commercial broadcasters fear the BBC will set a 'free' price point in the minds of consumers at which point it potentially limits their business models. (personally, i think there's always been free and paid for, but hey, i'm biased) so the BBC's job is to persuade rights holders and competitors whose livelihoods are based on the existing model that a new model is better - better for them, not you... given that sports rights maximise their revenue by selling rights on a region by region basis right now, it's highly improbable that the sports rights model will change any time soon. you simply cannot buy global internet rights to high-profile soccer/cricket/the olympics, and even if you could, i don't think it'd offer most licence fee payers value for money to offer it to the rest of the world for free, given the premium we'd need to pay for global rights.. If it costs us x amount more to buy the rights to allow download of our programmes than it costs us to broadcast them at present, is it good value for money to buy download rights now? When only 10% of internet users are regularly watching video on the web, and only 75% of the population online - so the premium we'd pay would only add value to a small percentage of licence fee payers. Now those numbers are changing all the time, and so is the premium we'd have to pay, and the bbc's job is to drive innovation, but my point is that it's a question of value (and hence timing), not principle. that battle is won. moving at all is decidedly non-trivial given the uncertainty over business models - rights holders are scared about all the uncertainty, and thus are not generally minded to agree to anything that might compromise a future, as yet unidentified revenue stream. fundamentally, it's all about the cost of rights. the tech bit is the easy part.... - 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]/
