Much criticism has been slung at the BBC for the size of its online presence. It’s already had to remove or freeze a lot of its best local content to give other local providers a chance to compete, yet its rivals, like ITV Local simply aren’t up to the task.
The trouble is that when the government legislates it often does so with one ear turned towards lobby groups, and those lobby groups can be so inward looking that they don’t see where the real threats lie.
In restricting what the BBC can and can’t do online, the government isn’t actually giving local rivals a chance to flourish; it’s just opening the door for more massive multinationals to further extend their reach.
The latest encroachment comes, again, from Google. Its already excellent services get better yet, as it now includes bus timetables on its maps. Not only that, but they are time-sensitive so if you search at, say, eleven in the morning, it’ll show you departures between then and noon, not busses already gone (here’s an example).
As with most Google innovations it appeared without notice or fanfare, but its arrival proves once again why the government is wrong to restrict our greatest national info-asset in the interest of ‘local’ producers.
Instead, we should allow the BBC to produce truly relevant domestic content rather than relying on Google to fill the gap. Tying its hands won’t encourage more diverse content from the UK, it’ll just let an even more homogenous entity over which it has even less control do precisely what it’s trying to prevent.
The only way in which restricting the BBC online could be right would be if the government then went on to give local producers the assets they need to compete with the likes of Google.
But that will never happen.
The BBC launched the iPlayer today. After months of user testing (or non-testing in my case, since I was sent a beta test invite some months back but have yet to take it up), it reckons it’s ready to go. Roll-out will be carefully managed, and ramped so that progressively more applicants gain to the service over time.
It’s already been well publicised (and well debated and well criticised) that the system needs Windows XP to run. Open-source advocates, Mac users, Microsoft critics and Vista users have bemoaned the fact that for the moment they’re all locked out, despite being license fee payers, and the BBC has promised to include one and all just as soon as it can.
But what about those of us who have no licence at all? I don’t have a TV in the house to which I’m moving, which annoys the fee collectors no end, to the extent that they sent out investigators to bang on my door and check I wasn’t lying.
They went away disappointed.
So if the iPlayer blocks access to viewers outside the UK, who can’t possibly have a licence, should it also block access to me? Am I any different to an Australian, who can listen to BBC radio, but shouldn’t really be watching BBC TV?
Maybe.
But what I’d rather see is a levelling of the playing field, whereby anyone, anywhere in the world can buy a licence and watch TV through the iPlayer. It would provide a massive, welcome boost to the BBC’s coffers, which could be ploughed back into programmes like Coast, How We Built Britain and The Proms.
Programmes like these would the iPlayer an invaluable asset in an online world otherwise dominated by the 30-second frippery of YouTube.
The unwritten rule of writing news is that news is news. Not comment. News. Facts, facts, facts and reportage, but never, ever, comment.
The BBC is very good at this, as evidenced by the fact that it can be self-critical in its own reportage without any sign of irony, defensiveness, or watering down of the facts, no matter how painful.
Sometimes, though, you wonder whether its reporters are slipping in a sneaky one behind a sub-editor’s back. Here’s a good example, from a story published yesterday about L’Oreal being knuckle-rapped for giving Penelope Cruz false eyelashes in an ad for mascara that made your eyelashes look 60% longer.
It also ruled the adverts “did not make clear that the claim referred to an increase in the ‘appearance’ of lash length”.
In the commercial for L’Oreal Paris Telescopic mascara, Cruz stood on a terrace next to a telescope and said: “Imagine, lashes that could reach for the stars.”
That, in its most subtle sense, is a direct news translation of the phrase ‘and if you believe that you’ll probably believe anything’.
Good old BBC.
The original story is here.
I don’t know how this happened, especially as my privacy settings were such that only my friends and students in my networks could view my photos… It’s quite unbelievable and I am very pissed off…
What I find quite unbelievable is the naivety of the person who made this comment, as quoted in The Guardian. Not only is she showing a lamentable lack of understanding of the net as a public medium, but she’s also a student at Oxford University, and so at the pinnacle of British academic achievement.
The story is this: proctors at Oxford have been logging on to Facebook, trawling the photos for any that might suggest misdemeanour on the part of graduating students and then hauling them up for their behaviour, either fining them £100 (a surprisingly hefty blow, I’d imagine, when you already have a considerable student debt racked up), or delaying their graduation until they’ve stood before a disciplinary board.
The quoted student, Alex Hill, seems to think that restricting your photos to just your friends and other members of the networks of which you’re a member will keep you safe, but with Facebook networks being so easy to join that’s like leaving your front door key under your front door mat. With the corner of the mat turned up. And a large pointy sign saying ‘key here’. Illuminated.
The Students’ Union made a middle of the road comment about privacy, clearly minded not to inflame the proctors any further:
While the Student Union does not condone unruly, violent or disorderly behaviour, we believe that the privacy of our members should be protected and that disciplinary procedures at all levels within the University should be fair and transparent.
They are sentiments with which few could disagree, but at the same time it’s hard to feel that these student’ privacy has been compromised when they, themselves, were foolish enough to post images to what is, at best, a semi-private, semi-public forum.
Passwords and privacy are not the same thing. One day, perhaps, our educated elite might realise that.
