Ok, so that might be a rather strong headline, but it was the best I could think of to describe what is currently going on. (That’s Nero fiddling while Rome burns, btw).
It’s no secret that I am dissappointed that the BBC has spent so much time and money trying to re-invent the wheel For The Glory of the Corporation. I think the BBC should do more, a LOT more, to hook into the innovation happening in technology companies in the private sector, and at the same time allowing private sector companies to innovate around the products the BBC produces. And that does not mean just commissioning more user interface design, or the odd microsite, from a bunch of agencies. If it did so, the BBC might even find some products it quite liked and could use to make the BBC better. Really. No kidding.
Yes, you can talk to me about Rights (”but we don’t have the release forms for that show’s music to be used online!” Yawn.) till the cows come home. That’s what the BBC should do. And I do not mean just organising another barcamp style event for geeks to feel warm and cuddly about the Beeb (with apologies to those great guys over at BBC Backstage).
I’m talking about turning the BBC into a platform that UK startup technology companies can work on and with.
Last week the BBC Trust’s review of Bbc.co.uk found the whole project in a bit of a mess. The most succinct account of this is over at PDA. Here are the main points.:
• The BBC breached its 2007/2008 budget by a whopping 48%.
• Two-thirds of the £35.8m overspend was down to “misallocation of general overheads and costs” such as failing to include costs such as the buildings that house its digital teams. Oh yes.
• Who gets fired? No one. (Thats OK though – former digital head Ashley Highfield has already jumped ship).
• Will the spend go down? No. They are adding £4.4m extra and taking the baseline budget for 2007/2008 of £74.2m to £114.4m, a 54% increase. Trebles all round!
• This does not take into account the BBC’s £400m “future media” budget, so the BBC actually has £500m to spend on digital media. Imagine what you could do with that…
• The Trust recommended three new levels of “protections” aimed at better controlling the BBC’s digital ambition: stricter financial controls, clearer definition for what each part of the website aims to achieve and an “independent” assessment of market impact where competitors risk being “overwhelmed by the scale of the BBC.”
• These rivals could now appeal to this mythical “independent” panel – which is in fact overseen by the BBC Trust. But guess what – the panel would most likely take 18 months to two years to adjudicate. Any startup trying to enter this process would be dead before it got going.
Now, I am not going to weigh into the argument the commercial newspaper sector normally has with the BBC. That’s just dull. They should be innovating just like the rest of the startup sector does on the smell of an oily rag, rather than whining about the BBC’s competition.
But the best way the BBC can now allay any fears about its market dominance is by building a platform for innovation. Not a policy – a real platform. With APIs even.
That way we’ll get our money/value back – and the BBC can start to give something back, not just TV and radio programmes, but a real platform for UK startups to become world beaters.
UPDATE:
I’m starting a list of links to the small number of people inside the BBC who “get it”
Excuse me sir, politely may I ask….what in the name of the Old Aunty are you talking about exactly? I have someone who I deal with at work, who makes more sense than this article…and he rarely makes sense, so that’s saying something.
You talk about “a real platform” without actually explaining what you mean. Are you talking about a Facebook-style platform or just opening up their systems more with API’s and such?
I’ve been using SportDaq (http://bbc.co.uk/sportdaq) for a while now and I’d love to build a desktop widget to play it but currently they only expose data through XML feeds – there’s no API for the functionality.
Either way I’m all for it, but I think you need to be more specific as to what you’re expecting from them. There’s a lot that can be done with £500m but it’s not unlimited and I’m sure they have a lot of people pulling them in different directions.
And then there’s the mountains of bureaucracy that accompanies any company dealing with public money – stuff always costs more when you have to deal with that too.
I would be very interested to see the comparison in budget for BBC iplayer and ITV’s catch up service.
I would bet my licence fee on ITV coming in far, far less.
I have to say I agree with you Mike.
The BBC has a unique opportunity which it seems to be studiously letting slip through its fingers, and it needs to be listening, and also has to show some leadership, and get some of their heavy ‘policy-bound’ contraints freed up by creative IP and licensing as well as JVs and commercial spin-offs.
What they need perhaps is a ‘WakeUpCamp’ where they get to learn what’s possible – but who’s going to help them organise that?
You sound as though the BBC never gives anything back.
And yet they have produced what promises to be the saviour of video on the web – dirac.
There is a real issue here about the damage that the bbc is doing to the digital commercial sector. Look at what happened to commercial radio – could be the same thing in online video and news – the TV companies and press are getting crowded out by the BBC.
The purchase of Lonely Planet seemed to say it all. Big money (about £70-odd million from memory for a 75% stake) spent on our behalf presumably as a vehicle for publishing the mountain of travel content the public has already paid for. Oh to have some of their footage
Slightly different view (I blogged about it last week) but big picture I think the ral UK opportunity is in digital media, and rather than a platform the BBC could foster an Ecosystem
http://broadstuff.com/archives/989-Would-you-trust-the-BBC-in-New-Media.html
Sorry Mike. Although of course I understand the agenda of supporting UK start-ups, the BBC has much bigger fish to fry.
Justifying the licence fee is a constant consideration and developing a system that allows tech start-ups into its peculiar game really won’t help it do that.
All it’ll focus on (rightly in my eyes) is using its walloping wallet to develop services considered valuable to UK licence fee payers. I think it could safely argue that digitally it continues to do that.
It’s also easy to have a pop at Ashley Highfield, but, whatever cash was spent on it, the iPlayer is a big fat success. The new site is great too. Similar wads of money have been spanked on complete failures.
This does not take into account the BBC’s £400m “future media” budget, so the BBC actually has £500m to spend on digital media. Imagine what you could do with that…
This does not take into account the BBC’s £400m “future media” budget, so the BBC actually has £500m to spend on digital media. Imagine what you could do with that…
Well, what exatly do they do with it?
Philip Buxton – No, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m not saying the BBC should focus on startups. That would be dumb. I’m saying if it had a platform which was geared towards third party innovation, both it, and the creative businesses it interfaced with (and that includes creative tech firms) would benefit mutually. By definition, because of what is increasingly going on online, the Beeb is gradually going to STOP delivering to license payers because the latter are simply going elsewhere to get the kinds of things the BBC is not delivering. Hence why you need third party innovation and hence why the BBC could, if it chose to, really power that forward to everyone’s benefit.
It seems to me that there are three issues.
1. Market distortion with the BBC as an instant behemoth in whatever market it enters. An example is the iPlayer, which is wildly popular among licence fee payers but has online video startups tangentally competing with it unhappy, because of its dominance. On this issue, I think the BBC has drawn the line in the right place (although it could have done so with a far smaller budget, I would have thought). The BBC Trust in its new reformed state is, I think, in a good position to ensure that the BBC addresses market failure rather than competing too strongly with commercial ventures just for the sake of it, although I think you have a good point about the need for really fast decision making. The iPlayer was so delayed because of the length of time the consultation and report from the Trust took to produce, and that drag is inconsistent with a fast-moving, nimble and cheap operation.
2. Embracing of new media/platforms. I think it is clear that the BBC continues to do sterling work in this area after an arguably slow start. They publish some excellent blogs (albeit with partial feeds) and the wide availability of podcasts is fantastic – they need to continue in the same direction.
3. Open access to data and content. I’m not sure exactly what sort of platform you would like to see the BBC have to enable ‘third party innovation’, but it would potentially be interesting. The only question I have is how would it be different from Backstage? Backstage is already publishing data, and I can’t think of any particularly exciting products/startups which have been built on the back of that data. Content is another matter; the Archive trial concluded a few months ago, and hopefully that will be back in the future, with all commercially-worthless (because if they put content with commercial value on there for free our licence fee would have to go up) material on there. That would have interesting implications for startups – for example, that material would be exposed to multimedia search startups.
Hi Mike.
Not this blog post again !
I won’t repeat what i said last time you wrote it but in the meantime have a look at the identity ppt from xtech (where my team presented alongside Tom Scott and his guys). Hope it makes it into your “little list”.
http://www.slideshare.net/bquinn/xtech-2008-bbc-tech-refresh-and-identity-brendan-quinn-and-ben-smith
Also Future Media and Technology have a guaranteed income due to the licence fee for which we are very grateful, I think (as i said last time) there is definitely more that we can do to encourage innovation in the UK sector and open up our data/code. That said a lot of that is down to rights and our existing infrastructure. Some teams/individuals are already doing a lot, and you acknowledge some movement in that direction. (Hi Tom!) As for the budget.. I really can’t comment on whether the budget is too much or too little. The Trust agreed , in its review that the budget would “need to increase significantly”. One small correction, I think when you liberally (@Ivan) quote the £400m figure around you mean the budget for the entire dept. In which case you mean the entire office technology costs for the BBC (printers, phones, computers and stuff), its information and archives department and the other technology involved in producing, editing, storing, digitising, transmitting and archiving thousands of hours of tv and radio a week across many different platforms for the entire UK and beyond. Thats an awful lot of fiddling.
thanks
Jem Stone (BBC)
@Jem – Rest assured, I won’t be posting this again! I think a 48% budget over-run is probably quite enough to make my point for me, at least for a good while to come. However, my beef is not with the people inside the fox-holes dotted around the BBC’s political war zone who now and again lob grenades of openness at their department heads.
It’s with the whole hulking infrastructure of the Corporation that says “all we have to do is make programmes, put stuff online and meet the license fee expectations.” Instead of thinking about the fact that you have the potential for an astounding platform which would energise both the BBC and many private sector startups.
Guys,
Some of you seem to be missing the point. You can’t just banter about comments like, “the BBC has to justify the license fee” without asking WHY they have to do so.
There are a great many things about Auntie that I appreciate, but to be fair, if the BBC doesn’t open up their platform you have to question why they are allocating £500M to digital media. I mean, this is the same BBC that spent how much building out the iplayer (~£100M), when they could have cloned Youtube albeit with geotargeting. This is the same BBC that overspent their budget by a whopping 48% last year.
It seems to me that the BBC is just like any business. If they have money to spend, but are told if they don’t spend it they will lose it, surprise, they will find a way to spend it. Its the same reason that on the last week of the financial year you suddenly see your council doing loads of work.
Spending our money just because they can just to justify the TV tax, erm I mean license fee, doesn’t sound very fair to me. Its about time the money is spent to open up opportunities to those less fortunate (ie, the startup/business community).
The problem with your analysis, Mike – which is all very gutsy and heartfelt and to-the-barricades and so on – is that it requires you to ignore the entire institutional, legislative and economic framework. The Beeb is the state broadcaster, governed by a charter, supervised by a trust and (most important) wrapped in 80 years of social and political consensus. It really won’t do to just harry the old girl every time a new report comes out. You need to make an honest assessment of how such an institution can be manoeuvred into
[oops] a more responsive position. The logical outcome of your proposals would be the kind of institutional vandalism that tax payers and business would almost certainly hate. You’ll also need to pick your targets better. There is absolutely nothing in the charter or any of the service definitions about supporting startup businesses. In fact, as far as I can tell, pretty much everything you suggest would require a new charter (or a new annexe of some kind) which would require the assent of Parliament (oh, and the Queen) so your best target is probably the select committee and legislators in general (although I recognise it’s easier to have a go at Auntie).
As an industry but also as a body of customers for the BBC’s services I think we need to take our job a bit more seriously and work harder to define the possible interactions of a creature like the BBC with content producers, application developers, social entrepreneurs and so on. I’m quite impressed by Channel 4’s effort to do just this with their Next on 4 report. Perhaps the rest of the web 2.0 industry should get together and jointly fund a more reasoned response to the service review? Why don’t you arganise some sort of debate on the topic?
Steve Bowbrick – Great points. Good idea. I will see if I can put something together.
Mike, the way you phrase it makes it sound like the BBC is the only body that’s ever had an overspend of that size. I’d suggest you spend some time working in a few corporations and find out how common poor budgeting like that is. I suggest you start with, say, ITV…
Other than that, Steve has made pretty-much every point I would have made, but (as usual) better
One point I would add, though, is that the BBC is, to a certain extent, already a platform via the various backstage projects. Of course, those are basically usable under non-commercial terms, which means that startups can’t just take the data and run.
But what’s wrong with that? After all, companies don’t pay (many) license fees – ordinary citizens do. If the BBC gives its content/data away to commercial entities to exploit, it’s missing out on revenue opportunities, which means it’s not maximising value to the license fee payer.
Brittish – innovation?
lol
Nick Bell said:
“I would be very interested to see the comparison in budget for BBC iplayer and ITV’s catch up service. I would bet my licence fee on ITV coming in far, far less.”
Have you ever tried using the ITV.com catch-up service on Firefox?
Here’s my (small) contribution – a map of BBC correspondents with RSS feeds of their name and location:
http://www.stuart-pinfold.co.uk/bits/corrmap/
Ian Betteridge – First off, I’m not going to apologise for trying to kick start this debate about how the BBC could tick more than just the Reithian box of inform, educate and entertain, but also power innovation. Second – who says the BBC has to give their platform away for free? Perhaps they could monetise their platform at the same time? We are just at the beginning of this debate. There are lots of possibilities.
Ian – (Forgot to mention) Yes, the BBC is not the only body that’s ever had an overspend of that size and yes, ITV is also in the hole. But the BBC seems to be the only one where no-one gets fired, and the budget gets increased. Now THAT’s creative.
Hi, Mike,
You’d expect me to back my employer. But I must say, I find much of what you say nothing short of insulting. You’ve linked to one person at the BBC (the excellent and unique Tom Scott who happens to be in my team), both at his personal blog and on our RadioLabs blog, and you think that he’s the only person who “gets it” at the BBC? I’ve never worked somewhere with so many people who “get it”.
Much of our issues are caused by our admittedly outdated infrastructure – which is due for complete renewal this year (not a small task for the #3 website in the UK). All new BBC projects have RSS feeds and other views (microformats, RDF, etc) built-in at the design stage – just take a look at my team’s /programmes site (I manage the dev/design/architecture team for it) for a shining example. Where rights and talent negotiations permit (no, it’s more than just music which is the issue) of course we want to share our great content as far as we can. You might not realise that the BBC doesn’t even, currently, own the rights for our own programme schedules. Gulp.
You also conveniently forget the 25% of the new media budget that the BBC spends on independent new media production. Clearly not enough help for startups, but a fine start. And in defence of those that did the accounts, though we did overspend slightly, we didn’t really overspend to the amount that the papers have said. (There was a tremendous answer given today in our team briefing about this, most of which I’ve forgotten). Lest you forget, the papers see themselves in competition with the BBC, and their coverage, just like yours, is hardly unbiased.
And in response to one of the comments here – please let me (or Jem) know what blogs are running partial feeds, and I’d be delighted to discover the reasons. They irritate me just as much as you. The one I’m responsible for, the BBC Radio Labs blog, has a full feed, that much I can tell you.
James
(who thought until recently that he ‘got it’ too, but if TechCrunch says not, then I don’t. Back to school for me then.)
(speaking in a moderately personal capacity)
Ok sorry. I couldn’t resist. An overspend is when you spend more than you budgeted for. An overspend is not when the BBC Trust decides, perhaps sensibly, that the lights and desks shouldn’t be charged to the buildings dept but to bbc.co.uk instead. And that the multi platform lot in telly or radio should be counted against bbc.co.uk rather than tv instead. And therefore the total budget for bbc.co.uk should be reported as higher than they previously thought. Overspend or a re allocation of planned budgets. You decide.
The actual overspend in the budget was less than 4m but you’d have to actually read the report to find that bit out
(9 thick PDFs !)
as for merely ticking that reithian box of inform, educate and entertain. quite a box i’d say there mike.!
@stevebowbrick . Of course. We’d be delighted to be able to respond to such a conversation. Mike Be great to see Tech Crunch play a part in that.
@ Ian: Coming from the corporate world myself, of course overspends like this happen all the time. But when they do, people get fired. Why? Because the stockholders wouldn’t stand for it. We are the stockholders, so that overspend just came out of your pocket.
@ Jem: Only £4M? Odd, the trusts own report states it to be £28.4 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/29_05_08_bbc_trust.pdf).
@james cridland
“Lest you forget, the papers see themselves in competition with the BBC.”
The reality is that the BBC is killing the online market for the four very high quality newspapers we are lucky to have in the UK. They ARE in competiton with you (and suffering from it).
@anon – of course, the reality is that the BBC is in competition with newspapers. Don’t agree it’s “killing the online market”; it’s healthy and distinctive competition, yes, but no, it’s not ‘killing’ anyone. I can still see a Guardian, Telegraph, Times, and Indy website – and indeed BBC News links to them along with other news websites, from every single news story.
Incidentally, I don’t work for BBC News, and therefore they’re not in competition with me personally, unless they wish to move into the online radio space (which naturally they’re perfectly within their rights to). Don’t conflate me with “the BBC” – I’ve not used the phrase “portfolio prioritisation” yet, I’m clearly not a proper Beeboid, and I’m critical of lots of what the corporation does (online or not).
Good to hear backstage is still loved….
I’m also thinking this would make a good podcast, as it keeps coming up again and again.
This is absolutely spot on. The BBC should be inviting outside developers and content providers to create fantastic innovations that will benefit licence payers. Really the BBC should be driving online innovation like Google and Facebook, but we have no equivalent here.