Slashdot Mirror
BBC to Put Entire Radio & TV Archive Online
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC is to to put it's entire radio and television archive online, free for everyone, as the BBC Creative Archive." The article is a little thin on how far back these archives go, but regardless, this is a gigantic amount of data, and to see it go online, and open to the public is very cool.
Phase 1. Make everything available online for free.
Phase 2. ???
Phase 3. Profit!
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
RealMedia is better than WMP.
Plus, they'll want to use something that can not be downloaded easly (that is downloaded, and stored, not streamed).
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
Before we rejoice and pop off the champagne to celebrate, allow me to pour some water on the fire:
- the article was quite vague, and it was clearly aiming to state that releasing for free material is a duty (newly discovered...) of a public broadcaster, while for other endeavours there are commercial broadcasters, who should not be charged huge licence fees (winking to them...);
- this is obviously a not particularly bright attempt by the BBC to defend a role which is no longer clear to themselves nor to the spin-based Blair dictatorship, recently torpedoed by the Kelly affair; with the review of the Royal Charter, which provides the conditions under which the BBC operates, due soon (I think in 2005, in any case before Tony the liar gets the boot); it looks like pre-emptive defensive action thus...
- as to the format in which stuff will be made available, let's see: recently BBC changed even its teletext format to prevent users who receive spill-over broadcast (like myself in Belgium) to fully access teletext information; I have my doubts on their willingness to make something available for free outside of Little England...
Thufir Hawat
Part-time Mentat
Actually it was Tony Ball, the chief executive of BSkyB, making a keynote speech at the Edinburgh Television festival, and he has also been saying this for a long time.
Here's how The Times reported it, and here's how the BBC News website reported it.
Although undoubtedly he is partly making these statements because of self-interest, I think he makes a good point. Firstly because the BBC is not supposed to simply compete with commercial channels. It is supposed to be aboutv public-service broadcasting and independent programming. I truly believe it is wasting public resources. It is still behaving as if it is the only broadcaster in the country, which it simply isn't.
If other free-to-air channels will broadcast such important things as US TV like 24 etc anyway, then it is a waste of public funds for the BBC to buy them, and this is essentially Tony Ball's point.
Personally I don't view the license fee as good value for money. Greg Dyke et al. have lowered the tone of its output significantly in recent years. The quality of news reporting has been significantly dumbed down. Sky News is now viewed by many people as being every bit as good as BBC News 24.
The reporting of the Iraq war may or may not have been biased against the government; I would much rather watch something which acknowledged its bias than smoething which, like the BBC, high-mindedly claims "unbiased reporting" when if you think about it no such thing exists. However, in the dossier affair in my opinion they have shown their true colours. It wasn't news. Pure and simple. Why did they give the argument between them and the government such prominence as they did (top story) when almost noone else was? Incidentally it was the Labour government, and not the Murdoch press that kept on about it.
I hope that next time the BBC's charter comes up for renewal the license fee is not kept. If you do not live in the UK and you like BBC programming, you should be aware that the World Service is already funded from general taxation (from the Foreign Office budget in fact), and that the cost of programming is significantly supported by selling it abroad.
The poor British public has been paying an exorbitant "tax" for years to pay for the Beeb, even as its quality has descended in to the latrine pit of slanted news.
So when we start listening to all this, raise a pint to our cousins across the pond!
Once again, Britain contributes rather than detracts from Western Civilization, and I thank them for it!
--TheGoldWater
Agreed. The best approach is to end the market interference (the BBC's monopoly) ASAP, converting it into a functioning and competitive market with real services being offered, instead of a bureaucracy milking a captive public to fund whatever it wants! It worked brilliantly in telecomms and other utilities in the UK, and produced dramatic improvements in transport (even the rail network is far better now than under the mismanagement of British Rail, although it's deteriorated again since Byers stole it from the owners). Time to apply it to broadcasting.