The BBC’s heavenly cloud of digital content
The Economist has a short piece about the BBC’s future on the Internet, following announcements of the Beeb’s plans to unlock their archives by providing access via the Internet to a treasure trove of programmes going back to the first half of the last century.
Its most ambitious idea is to go ‘on-demand’, making the million programmes it has produced since 1937 available to viewers online, mostly for free. Soon it plans to introduce a new service, BBC iPlayer, to allow people to catch up on programmes they missed on its main channels.
Potential downsides: some private sector players are pointing to the potential for this digital flood of Biblical proportions to have adverse effects for themselves, such as:
Opening up the BBC’S archive, mainly for free, could amplify the corporation’s market-distorting effect. Lots of popular past programmes will suddenly be available alongside its current shows. People have a limited time to goggle, and if they spend it watching old BBC favourites such as ‘Smiley’s People’, they will skip something else, which might include pay-TV or DVDs or TV financed by advertising.
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