I’m also thinking this would make a good podcast, as it keeps coming up again and again.

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).

“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).

@ 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).

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.

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Much of our issues are caused by our admittedly outdated infrastructure – which is due for complete renewal this year (not a small task for the #3 website in the UK).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)

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/

lol

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.