Category: BBC

This is the kind of thing those insrutable Finns were after when they abducted Matt Jones and sequestered him in their arctic circle underground think-o-tron. I think it’s quite a good idea.

Speaking of hijacking license payer-funded audio, I learnt a huge amount from this 13 minute, middle-of-the-night gem at the weekend. It’s one of the World Service’s ‘Instant Guides‘. This one’s about Al-Qaeda (quiz: did you know that Al-Qaeda was originally a bureaucracy – a kind of Mujihideen recruitment agency? Did you also know that Al-Qaeda offered to eject the Iraqis from Kuwait but the Saudis said ‘no thanks’ because they’d already lined up the Americans for the job?). It’s one of thousands of really good factual programmes made every year using the BBC’s awesome specialist resources that’s crying out for a good, accessible archive (this stream will be overwritten by next week’s in a few days. How stupid is that?). Building a fantastically useful media archive from the BBC’s day-to-day output should be easy. It’s driving me mad to see it coming together so slowly!

A handy primer for Ofcom’s review of public service broadcasting in Q&A form from Maggie Brown in Media Guardian.

I can’t tell from his weblog what Luke Gibbs does for a living but I think he’s going to save me a lot of effort by trawling the media to keep me up to date with the activities of Britain’s new ‘media super-regulator’, Ofcom. He also links to Russ Taylor’s Media Frenzy, which is mainly about Ofcom’s US model the Federal Communications Commission.

A great rift has opened up between the BBC and Sky and more than a decade of servitude is over. The BBC will, from the end of May, broadcast its channels unencrypted on a new Astra Satellite with a smaller, UK-only, footprint.

Most people, including me, don’t really understand what this means (do I have to get a new dish? Will I continue to get the BBC channels with my Sky subscription? Will my Sky subscription be cheaper?) so there hasn’t been much dancing in the street yet but the BBC is now essentially free to build its own multichannel, free-to-air digital TV service with close to 100% UK reach (instead of the approximately 70% provided by Freeview’s compromised terrestrial network). Emily Bell in The Guardian and Richard Tait in The FT both focus on Greg Dyke’s audacity and on Sky’s limited room for manoeuvre in constructing a response. Tait goes into more detail on the new arrangements but you may need an FT.com subscription to see his article.

You’ll have read this in dozens of places already (like, for instance, The Hollywood Reporter and The Bristol Evening Post) but I thought I ought to mark the really quite important news that the BBC is making deep cuts at BBCi, its online and interactive division, and that these cuts will come principally from the department’s web activities – two thirds of the interactive factual and learning division in Bristol, for instance.

The Corporation is doing this well ahead of the upcoming Government review of BBCi’s activities – I understand that the Department of Culture, Media & Sport (the ministry responsible) hasn’t even finished setting terms of reference for the review, let alone appointed someone to do it.

This is, I’m sure, a tactically cunning preemptive strike. It’s almost inevitable that the review, when finally convened, would have recommended some cuts, even if only because BBCi has been allowed to grow more-or-less ad lib across multiple departments.

Hard-pressed UK media owners may also be relieved to see a bite taken out of their state-funded, inflation-protected number 1 competitor but it would be a mistake to read this as a response to their complaints. The online publishers’ puny lobby hasn’t made a dent so far.

David Docherty, until recently head of broadband content at Telewest, defends the ?200M invested in BBCi so far. From Media Guardian.