> I can see why if I were a small company making educational > software for kids I wouldn't be pleased to have to compete > with the BBC suddenly inserting itself into my market and > offering to cover the ENTIRE national curriculum for nothing. > Clearly that kind of empire building is going to have a > negative impact on existing markets.
I wouldn't be pleased either, but of course this never happened. A core requirement (thrashed out through years of wrangling, I believe) for the Digital Curriculum project from the Department of Culture, Media n' Sport was that no more than 50% of ICT-compatible learning 'outcomes' would be covered by the commissioned work - leaving *plenty* of space for the market to move around in and produce competitive work in. Never mind the fact that Jam produced learning materials for and in minority languages such as Gaelic and Welsh that the commercial sector wouldn't have gone near in a million years due (to the lack of profit margin). Of course, having had this concession made to them, the private e-learning sector was still narked that Jam was producing a lot of genuinely excellent learning content that was streets ahead of what they were producing. So they went to the EU, who went to the Trust, and we got shut down. Unlike the Murphy's... Paul (ex-BBC Jam) - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
