BBC: taking risks the private sector won't

The Grauniad's Victor Keegan has a stirring editorial on the way that the BBC can afford to take risks that the private sector can't afford, proving out new technology. He mentions last year's wonderful Second Life/real life music festival, which gave rise to a private sector venture to do more in virtual worlds.

The BBC needs to be cut down to size because it uses the certainty of its licence fee to undermine entrepreneurial initiatives in the private sector. That is the accusation used by many of its rivals as they try to prevent the BBC from getting an above-inflation rise in its current licence application, a decision on which is imminent. The reality is rather different, as two recent examples illustrate. Back in May the BBC – Radio 1, actually – was prescient in launching a pop concert in the now-fashionable Second Life virtual world that attracted 6,000 people. The spin-off from the event is credited with tripling the number of SL participants and helping to change it from a geek's secret paradise into a mainstream phenomenon. Justin Bovington, chief executive of Rivers Run Red, the enterprising Soho company that employs 22 people to build projects in SL, reckons that only the BBC could have done that because private sector companies wouldn't have taken the risk.

Unfortunately, the Beeb seems poised to renege on its most important promise — putting its entire archive online, without DRM, for the British public to download and remix. Instead, they're chasing crappy Windows DRM non-solutions that fail to decriminalize Britain's creative remixers, that forces law-abiding Brits to use American software to see British TV, and that abolishes the idea that you should be able to record an Internet TV program the way you would record a TV program with your VCR.

The Beeb needs to spend less time sucking up to Microsoft and making vague announcements about upcoming "partnerships" and more time doing what it does best: taking the risks that the private sector is too scared to take on its own.

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(via Wonderland)