BBC airs its first Creative Commons licensed TV show

The BBC has finally produced and aired a TV show that can be released under Creative Commons, along with the "asset bundle" of associated media that went into the final cut. The show is a pilot for a broader strategy of giving Britons the freedom to re-use the material they pay for through the "license fee," which all television owners are obliged to pay, and which funds the vast majority of the BBC's operations.

The BBC announced the move on Thursday through its Backstage Blog. For now, the experiment is extremely limited. A single program, called R&D TV, will be released for download to anyone, regardless of whether they're located in the UK or not. So far, only one episode is done, and a second is in the works; more may be made if these prove to be reasonably popular.

Episode one can be downloaded from a BBC FTP server, where Flash, Quicktime, and Ogg versions are available, either as a five minute series of excerpts or in its full, half hour glory. The blog post suggests that Windows Media versions should be made available as well but, so far, these have not materialized. The files will also be made available through YouTube and Blip.TV.

But it's not so much the ready availability of this material that makes it a bold step forward, but the license under which it's released: the Creative Commons non-commercial attribution license, v2. As the accompanying Read Me file (complete with the old-school ASCII BBC logo) says, "you can watch, rip, redistribute and remix all the contents of this package." As long as you don't try making money from the videos, you're set.

BBC airs, releases program under Creative Commons license

R&DTV: a collaborative project between BBC Backstage & RAD (Thanks, Marilyn!)

• [Martin Cleaver]

  Cool! Let’s get it on Kaltura and get mashing.

• [jeffv]

  Truly awesome! Let me be the first to congratulate the BBC for trying this out. Congratulations guys!

• [redrichie]

  @ #6 Gaberussel

  To be fair to the BBC, isn’t the Kontiki software that the likes of iplayer and 4OD use fairly similar to Bittorrent? I’m sure that it’s peer-assisted, to reduce the costs. So I’m sure that they are aware of such ways of working?

• [guy_jin]

  I doubt the BBC will make a regular thing of this. One of their bigger cash cows is licencing TV shows to foreign broadcasters – like American PBS stations. If they make shows free for noncommercial use, they’ve just given away their product to those stations.

• [Bugs]

  This is great! Now if only they could persuade their providers to let them strip the DRM from iPlayer.

  As a side-note, you only need a TV license if you use your TV to watch broadcast television. If you have a TV that’s only used for watching DVDs and/or playing games, you don’t need a license.

  You also don’t need a license to watch archived BBC content through their website. The license is only required for watching or recording stuff as it’s broadcast, so watching it a few hours/days later on iPlayer doesn’t count.

  That probably doesn’t affect many people, but a surprising number of Brits don’t know it.

• [Cory Doctorow]

  @2: BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the Beeb, accounts for less than 5% of the total BBC budget. Letting the other 95% be driven by the need to earn a few quid serving as a glorified video-rental service for Americans is a bad way to run a British broadcaster.

• [Anonymous]

  @BUGS
  I think that you will find that new (not so new actually) laws insist that you DO pay for a TV license if you download content via the BBC iPlayer but not other sites like ITV and Channel 4!
  But enforcing it is a different matter.

• [gaberussell]

  @BBCRAD:

  1) I’m downloading the files from the HTTP server via Safari on the staff leg of a university network. It certainly could be something on my end, but I was able to get the 5 minute version (461MB) without a problem. I just tried downloading the 3GB file via CURL, and it cut out at 270MB again.

  2) I’m confused about your points on Bittorrent. What type of “control” do you mean? By hosting the show on your own servers, you actually maintain more control than if you release it into wild via Bittorrent. And you don’t have to run your own tracker – just seed the file and upload the .torrent to a bunch of public trackers. Let the herd take care of the rest.

  I’m also curious how HTTP/FTP distribution is cheaper than streaming and OTA broadcast. That makes sense for a small audience – I can see the savings on infrastructure in the case of a few hundred downloads. But distributing 100MB-3GB files to thousands of viewers must take some toll, either in bandwidth costs or availability. You’re giving us the content, let us take some of the burden.

  As TV producer (occasionally for PBS, who doesn’t seem to be anywhere close to this kind of thing), I’m excited to see larger content creators experimenting with unguarded internet distribution and CC licensing, and even encouraging remixing. I’d hate to see an idea like this get buried due to technical issues.

• [BBCRAD]

  Hi there. (warning, long post, I’ve tried to give some background and answer specific technical Qs)

  I run BBC RAD, the team that produced this in conjunction with BBC Backstage/ R&D. We’ve been watching reactions and reports to this pilot, and these will inform the next R&DTV episode (some general points around, eg sound quality etc).

  That said, some specific immediate responses from comments posted here (and we’re obv. delighted to be on boingboing)

  GuyJin – You guessed right. The BBC will not make this a regular occurrence, and we don’t expect them to. This is a trial, designed to work out whether new forms of content creation, licensing and distribution work for the teams involved (RAD – a rapid prototyping team, and BBC Research, an R&D team)

  Gaberussel -it was news to me that this isn’t a real FTP server. We FTP to it to upload, and TBH I thought the http:// protocol in front of the FQDN was merely a helper for some browsers that have problems with FTP.

  Now you’ve pointed this out (thank you), when I try to anon FTP to it, you’re right, it just sends me to someone’s dropbox. This means that although the server might be OK by RFC959, it’s useless to just GET the RDTV files from. We will fix asap – this is a problem at our end, not the fantastic sysops that run the FTP server.

  Gaberussel again – How are you trying to access the file that time out for you at 270Mb? I’m not sure which version you’re trying, but when I grab it directly (via curl:
  curl -v http://ftp.kw.bbc.co.uk/backstage/rdtv/RDTV_ep1_30mins.mov > rdtv.mov
  ) or in browser (either FF/ Safari on a Mac or Konqueror on Linux and FreeBSD, it’s fine) – it might be that the size of the file is causing problems at your end. I’ll take another look tomorrow, but repeatable error reports are welcome – [e-mail]

  Your other point about distribution costs (“Think they’ll figure out Bittorrent any time soon?”) has a number of answers:

  We’re avid users of BT in my team – from getting major GNU/Linux or *BSD isos through to very very large (internal) files that we share in a P2P way for failover and access time benefits.

  we have very deliberately not seeded this ourselves as a torrent – for 2 reasons:

  1) We didn’t want to “control” where it ends up. We’re pleased it’s on some of the popular trackers, and may well seed it ourselves next time. For this first release, TBH, some of the interest is in making it available under a non-restrictive licence, with Free codecs available, and seeing what people do with it.

  2) We didn’t know whether we wanted to run a tracker, or work with trackers, or if good old F/HTTP was all that was needed, and the community would use or build what they wanted. NB For the BBC, unicast http or FTP download of this compared to our other Internet distribution costs of popular mainstream shows (or the over-the-air costs that make up the vast majority of our distribution costs) is a drop in the ocean.

  BTW It might also be worth pointing out that my team also runs the BBC’s involvement in a large EU project called P2P-Next (http://p2p-next.org) looking at a next gen P2P client (eg involving live TV and radio content delivered via P2P

  We’re still unsure about whether we should run our own tracker. There are pros and cons to both approaches.

  Finally. an overall comment that’s been raised a number of times is summed up by Cory: “As long as you don’t try making money from the videos, you’re set.”

  A CC non-commercial licence was the one we went with, (and our fab legal team were very helpful with what, after all, is still an experiment) – but TBH the amount of sites that *may* have a text ad or two that have been in touch to ask whether they can use *even though* they might have a small commercial element on the side means that we are actively looking at whether we should do the next one with a commercial element possible.

  And a very final point is – we need a BTS (bug tracking system -eg Bugzilla, etc) for stuff like this. We obviously use them internally to hack, develop, and deploy code with, and the mainstream BBC has a great CRM system for tracking viewer and listening issues, but what’s become apparent when watching and responding here and elsewhere is that releases by RAD/R&D on projects like RDTV should allow viewers to file or point at specific bugs – reported inhouse, on sites like these, or elsewhere – and we will do this asap.

  This realisation is an unexpected side affect of this trial, and is thus a Good Thing. Setting it up may take a time, I do hope not.

  Sorry for what will doubtless be a long post.More feedback welcomed! We’re also on twitter and identi.ca as @bbcradlabs

  Regards

  George

• [caffeine addict]

  Cory – TV owners don’t need TV Licenses. It’s the recipients of TV broadcasts that do. If you have a TV that’s detuned and has no aerial plugged into the back, you don’t need a license.

• [BBCRAD]

  Martin – good pointer to Kaltura.

  After your post I got in touch with them (a very helpful person called Matt) and at the moment, although their platform and APIs seem v. cool, the bit we’d like – use our own CDN or distribution, possibly deploy some of their enhancements on top – isn’t there. This is apparently coming real soon now. We’ll take a look back later. Anyone using their stuff now is, of course, free to upload RDTV to it. Thanks!

• [Anonymous]

  @2 -The fact users can mashup this content does not mean foreign broadcasters can broadcast it for free. If it’s good, and they want to show it, they would still have to pay the beeb. Films are available publicly ( granted, for a fee) on DVD, but TV stations still see it is worth paying to transmit them.

• [gaberussell]

  I can’t speak for the iPlayer as I’m in the US. I’m sure that whoever there is enlightened about CC is probably aware of Bittorrent as well, but who knows why they decided to post it on an “FTP” server (which is actually an HTTP site; try FTPing to that site and you’ll get what appears to be a production drop box for an unrelated show).

  That 3GB file keeps timing out after 270MB for me. Anyone else able to get it?

• [gaberussell]

  Wow – 3GB for the Quicktime file of the 30 minute episode. This is gonna get expensive for them fast. Think they’ll figure out Bittorrent any time soon?

• [Anonymous]

  @Gabe – if you can’t get the Quicktime file then give the ogg one a try – the 30 minute show is only 223MB in ogg format.