The ‘Creative Archive Licence Group’ is launched today at creativearchive.bbc.co.uk. While the identity politics of URLs seem to have the BBC still in the lead on this development, the lack of BBC branding suggests they are not going to have exclusive ‘ownership’ of it. The British Film Institute, Channel 4 and the Open University are […]
BBC
User interface for on-demand radio
A couple of days ago the BBC launched Version 2 of its successful BBC Radio Player. Rather than attempt a review — except to say it seems to be an all-round improvement, notwithstanding the frames that make it more awkward to link to individual programmes — here is The Guardian’s assessment [free registration required] and […]
Public Service Broadband content
Here are my notes from yesterday’s Public Service Broadcasting: Beyond Television event organised by the Broadband Stakeholder Group. I’ve decided to present the notes I took on my palmtop fairly unprocessed, since (a) most of the sessions were panel discussions, which it is hard to condense, (b) I don’t think there are any clear or […]
Latest on the BBC Creative Archive
Here are my notes from a talk given by Paul Gerhardt, Strategic Director of the BBC Creative Archive, at Tate Modern this afternoon. The current BBC Charter (due to expire in 02006) apparently provides for public access to the BBC archive, but ‘access’ means going in person to BBC premises to view or listen there. […]
Content vanishes from BBC web sites
At the end of last week the redesigned BBC 6 Music web site was launched. In the process of its revamp, the site has lost much of the specialist content that made it unique. For example, the Kings of the Wild Frontier pages that I wrote about here have gone, as have all the interviews […]
Learning songcraft via the web
The Edutainment field has, deservedly, got itself a bad name for not delivering on its promises. Often the premise has been that people see learning as boring or stodgy, so it has to be smuggled in, Trojan-horse-style, under the guise of a game or a celebrity-driven story. The Radio 2 Sold on Song web site […]
iPods, podcasting and learning
A couple of weeks ago I speculated about podcasting breaking out of traditional radio and journalism models to find new applications. Since then, I’ve found that many people are ahead of me in thinking about applications, particularly to learning. I first came across Podcasting for Education by D’Arcy Norman, which makes some suggestions for using […]
Pressure building for access to BBC radio archives
A month after Ofcom’s mutterings about enforced licensing of the BBC’s radio archive, a new report commissioned by DCMS concludes “The BBC should examine how it can enter into joint ventures with the commercial sector when considering future archive-based services.” The message seems to be that if the BBC isn’t making active use of its […]
Enforced licensing of BBC radio archive
There’s a new spin on access to the BBC’s archive in this article in today’s Guardian. The regulator Ofcom is proposing that the BBC could be forced to share its radio archive with the commercial world. The idea is that this would make digital radio more attractive and thus drive take-up by listeners. In his […]
The BBC’s digital direction
Based on interviews in the last fortnight with the BBC’s Director General (Mark Thompson), Chief Technology Officer (John Varney), and Director of New Media & Technology (Ashley Highfield), you might hope to be able to discern, by process of triangulation, a clear corporate position and direction. But what you get is a much more postmodern […]