Furthermore when your goal is to distribute high quality video content to large audiences as the BBC is doing the benefits of using peer assisted delivery become very significant.

While I can’t speak for the BBC in any way, I’d be happy to answer any questions about Kontiki.

Best Regards,
~>Bill

… and so on and so on…

The main problem I find with the BBC is that it forgets it two missions, to act as the creative venture capital for this country (The first “B”) and provide universal access.

The universal access in terms of pandering to different proprietary formats, rather than publishing a spec, and letting consumers pressure manufacturers to adapt to it (as original tv).
As well as the undeniable fact that there are poor people who will never be able to access the BBC’s web-ops out of poverty, and that the internet doesn’t work like broadcasting (incremental additional cost per user, out of the license fee -for people rich enough to afford broadband).

Creative venture capital (inc. web-content and software) in that when anyone has an idea that gains potential traction, from social networks to programme databases, to lifestyle web-magazines, et al, it will jump on them and squish any potential UK company, even worse is that it sees only the glittery gold and stars of American Companies.
It ignores the completely successful evidence from UKTV that has allowed it to license it’s content, to a commercial partner that is a UK company.

If it changed it’s attitude (which would be helped if its journalists really understood tech.) to one where if a good british company comes along it actually supports it (though not ignorance-based hype), with attention and understanding (and partnerships), to give some support until they don’t need it and it can then move on to finding/supporting another uk company in the same space.

Instead what we see, for example in the narrow field of mobile/web-video is where a few months ago the bbc news editor links aplenty to flixwagon and qik, while the BBC news department already knows of Forscene by forbidden Technologies ( forbidden.co.uk ) -they use it; no mention, no support, to a company that could do with it.
The same for video-clips/sharing, they do deals with all the web mega-corps like bebo, facebook, myspace and youtube, yet nothing for a not-insignificant site like http://www.Sumo.tv that already gets 5 million users -it [the public-service meant-to-be-universal bbc] has a dedicated youtube team (paid by our licence fee), and all it’s links from bbc3, etc programme sites link to youtube =is it any wonder yt’s stranglehold is only increasing.

If you want to be really pedantic, you can then drill even deeper into plain old text content like teen-magazine type stuff and movie times/listings (WTF), tell me that’s not taking anything away from the commercial operators in the UK when it’s giving it away for free (that it probably has to pay to license itself).

Look at the BBC mobile site and tell me how many of those services aren’t already available by commercial operators on every network. And who bares the network transmission costs of some of those type of services -these could all be profit-centres for the commercial BBC Worldwide part, rather than the out of the universal license-fee part ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/4287409.stm ).

It’s a litany of opportunity, ignorance and excess.

I know the BBC has some good people in it, some things are changing, I optimistically believe in it, but it’s a question of the same attitude that exists on the broadcast side, remaining and permeating/being absorbed by the open internet side.

Yours kindly,

Shakir Razak

Anyway, since you are the only BBC person to have the guts to engage in this debate, I’m voting for you to take over from Ashley right now!

And you guys can too, in our specially commissioned “Who should be the Web Guru of the BBC?” Poll. Vote now! Vote often!

http://uk.techcrunch.com/2008/04/15/who-should-be-the-next-web-guru-of-the-bbc-vote-now/

If the post was just “Open up your data BBC” and/or do a better job in linking/partnering with UK communities/start ups/services then i wouldn’t have responded because i agree with you. We could/should do more. I used to work alongside Ben Metcalfe and have the scars.

However you also had a fair bit to say about staff retention, Ashley’s experience/knowledge, innovation, the funding and delivery of iplayer and the BBC’s role (or not) in driving up broadband and or course our bean bags so i was mildly irked.

oh…
- i don’t think that that was really ashley highfield. i mean honestly. He knows how to spell Ubuntu for starters

In the early days of the internet the BBC did play a significant role as midwife, helping ordinary people learn to trust the mechanism. And I’m sure that role was as much global as domestic.

It’s less clear with the utilities now available to us all very cheaply what the BBC should do online. It used to be central to my life, but I’d say it is now peripheral, and sometimes deeply annoying.

But what it should do is not measure its success by audience size, page views, or downloads, but find more qualitative measures.

I agree with Dennis about the archive. We need that out there to look at and play with.

For the future, I’d say that it’s technology department should not be so engaged with delivery beyond that. But it should work more centrally with content makers on how to tell complex stories more accessibly, through documentary and news and drama, and increasingly find ways to do that in real-time. We’re in the middle of a credit crunch which is just such a complex event, combining a need for an understanding of technological, financial and behavioural complexity where the choices of individuals corporations and policy-makers can have untold negative consequences. My perception is that the organization is not up to the job yet. For sure there will be more such stories, like global warming, and they will likely come with increasing frequency for that is the nature of a technological/network society. Content makers and technologists seem to be looking in opposite directions.

Firstly I just want to throw my support for opening up the BBC’s data, in the same way I support Governments opening up their data and many other public and indeed private institutions. I think Tom Steinberg covers the theoretical and economic arguments well in the Power of Information (though its directed at Government, the same arguments apply for the BBC).

The difficulty the BBC (and most other “old Media” organisations) is having is understanding the emergent disconnect between content, production and distribution.

I see an analogy with the TV programme production. When TV technology was emergent the investment needed to produce programmes were high an organisation like the BBC was needed. As the cost of production decreased the independent sector appeared, (and thus the business model that Channel 4 use, coincidently it is this reason that C4 are more culturally adept at investing in web start ups now rather than keeping stuff in house – they never did produce stuff in house anyway http://snurl.com/24hro ). The BBC are now (just about) comfortable with the role of the inde sector and BBC policy is in place to invest a greater degree of there programming budget as such.

The same dynamic is now in place with web-technologies. When the cost levels were high (and the technology that divided content from design was yet to be mainstream) the BBC did very well – e.g. bbc.co.uk. The BBC could handle all previous developments as it still had control of distribution.

The entry costs into the web-technology sector are now low enough for an increasing sized inde sector, furthermore the the technology is now existent where content is divided from distribution. This terrifies the BBC as what the BBC does (should do) is content.

So for me, the issue is not about technology (I agree that numerous companies could have delivered the BBC their iPlayer at a fraction of the cost). Nor, I imagine, a the lack of vision from Ashley Highfield – im sure even if he himself couldn’t think up innovative ideas the geeks around him could.

The issue is political: When the BBC branding is diluted, the BBC fear that the down the line effect is that people question why they are paying the license fee, when they don’t feel as though they use the BBC.

The BBC are attempting to mitigate against:
“people believe that they get their news from google”

Before we can hope for truly open data we need to explain to the BBC that this wont happen (and are we sure it wont?), and we need those at the very high levels of the BBC to believe it wont happen.

So I hope is the person that replaces Highfield is persuasive and politically powerful enough to do so.

The DRM problems Ben mention were very real, huge but solutions were possible for at least a significant portion of the BBC’s digital assets.

My client spent over EIGHTEEN MONTHS trying to get to the finishing post on the deal, much of it going over the same ground time and again. It was a ball aching experience for everyone.

The paper I wrote in support of my client’s solution was solid and executable. Whether it would have achieved the desired effect is now moot, but all the relevant moving parts made sense.

As I understand, political decisions were taken about technology choices that were clearly (IMO) going in the wrong direction in the sense the solution offered by the opposition would have been more difficult to implement and almost certainly would not have yielded an appropriate result.

FF 4 years and it seems nothing has changed.

The fact is the BBC has huge value tied up in more than 75 years of programmed assets, in both sound and vision. Digitizing them would be an enormous undertaking but the value they could potentially release to the nation and beyond is almost incalculable. It’s a sunken treasure that almost certainly without comparison anywhere else in the world.

One can only hope that whomever they find to replace Highfield will have the smarts to realise the value – in more ways than one.

If Highfield was able to think out of the box even slightly, putting that money into some form of platform/API that allowed 3rd parties to leverage the content, would have mean a generation shift (a bit like when facebook opened its platform) in content delivery and also in the business models surrounding it. Lets really hope they can land someone like Ben M, or at least take on advisers within the right fields that will make a difference, but IMHO nothing will change in the next 5 years.

sent from: fav.or.it [FID274259]

But of course, a collaborative outward looking approach would offer more opportunities than threats – They need to shift from the insular old media view of broadcast and distribution to see this.

There are only a certain number of Brits online and the BBC hoovers up a huge percentage of those eyeballs. And eyeballs attract advertising.

It is not just a problem for start ups. How can the likes of The Telegraph and The Guardian hope to ever be able to compete with the Beeb in delivering online video? They just don’t have the resources.

Moreover, I think they do not owe anything to any startup in Britain, just because they are a public corporation. One of the reasons why people are starting to think there is a new bubble is because of startups built singularly around other tech companies. This is totally wrong from a business point of view.

In addition lets not look at the Beeb as tech savvy people, because let face it, for the average person, they deliver. (People only argue about having LESS spent on the areas they don’t like. BBC Three, anyone?)

Oh, and I don’t believe Facebook et all drive tech adoption more than the BBC. People get on the internet and get themselves broadband connections because companies like the BBC, SKY, Virgin, Three (yes 3!), Microsoft (and NOT Google) show them that there is more to what they are offering. Only after this do those people use Facebook etc.

Any company would find it hard, to deliver what the BBC does (in all areas) on their budget. All things considered we should be proud of the BBC.

The second point I’d make echoes Jem in a way – from when I first looked at it in c 1996, the BBC has become a global new media powerhouse, no questions about it. I don’t think many people outside the operations there quite “get” what scale its operating at. And to get there required some fairly delicate manouevering at times, both within and outside the BBC.

On can argue the “how” going forward though, and I agree an All- Microsoft future is probably not the best choice for a publicly funded service. I personally would like to see it champion Open Source wherever practical.

And as its our money paying for it all, I’d like to see more usage of, and linkage to, UK businesses in the space. The US does not have a lock on knowledge in this space by a long way – in fact in broadband digital media and mobile I would argue the UK / EU is at parity at least, if not ahead – for the moment. And we have to seize that moment.

As for the Last.FM point – listen, I have had the *actual* conversations with VCs in the past who would not back a startup which looked like it might have to compete with the BBC. Please don’t try to tell me otherwise because I believe my own ears. Now, that may not apply in ALL cases but it certainly has in some.

That’s not to say the BBC hasn’t trained up lots of people who’ve gone on to do many other things, of course. But I feel someone needs to fight the startups corner here.

Sometimes I think the question to ask of the BBC’s online presence in just a decade is really not how little but how much. ( Disclosure: I work there so i’m being a little mandy rice davies about it. i would say that wouldn’t I).

And what is the Last FM point ? The BBC prevented Last FM (did it ?) or without the BBC there would be more Last FM’s ? (really ?).