The BBC Creative Archive

Why has a BBC story about the BBC itself launched a big fat meandering thread at Slashdot? Because, as Danny O'Brien explains with right-on-the-money lucidity at his blog, Oblomovka, "This is a bigger story than it looks at first glance."

The gist: In a speech delivered in Edinburgh yesterday, Greg Dyke, director general of the BBC, announced that the corporation will be making its entire archives - 80 years of film, radio and television, some of it the best in the world - available to the public. For free. As long there's no commercial repurposing going on, anyone anywhere will be able to tap into the resources of the BBC Creative Archive.

It's sort of amusing, but understandable in a way, that this morning's British papers, from the Guardian to the Telegraph see a more immediate concern, the survival of ITV in the face of the Murdoch threat, as the real story (and, of course, the American papers ignore the whole damn thing). But the decision to carry on doing what the BBC was created to do in the first place, to take its services to a new level made possible by a collapse in the cost of distribution, that's the story whose impact will be felt for generations.

Again, Danny O'Brien: "Content distribution is free: content restriction is costly... While the commercial companies fret over the dangers of P2P and zero-cost replication, the BBC has realised that this is its greatest opportunity." Read that entry, follow the links.

(The BBC logo, by the way, comes from this wonderful page at Andrew Wiseman's Television Room.)

Posted by dwhudson at August 25, 2003 1:59 AM