> -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Paul Tweedy > Sent: 02 August 2007 12:19 > To: backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk > Subject: RE: [backstage] More iPlayer(/jam) protesting > > > > 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.
Well it was announced that it would happen, thereby scaring the bejasus out of independent companies. Had it not been for the ridiculous original ground grab then possibly some of the later problems would not have come to pass. > 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. Well IMO if they'd had any sense they would have steered well clear of rubbish like "learning outcomes", but regardless. because of the way the things was announced there were political wranglings that put in place many conflicting requirements that attempted (rather successfully IMO) to hobble jam. I won't claim for a moment that the indies were lily white in what happened. >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). jam attempted to a lot of good things. some incredibly smart people worked on it. but... > 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. "genuinely excellent"? ye gods! on that I'm afraid we will forever disagree. I sometimes wonder if all the talk of the European Court of Justice is just a way of quietly putting some really woeful content where nobody can ever see just how crappy it was. So they went > to the EU, who went to the Trust, and we got shut down. even on a strategic level I think the Trust were right. given how resticted jam was by its technology and the "core requirements(/hobbles)", starting it all again made sense to me. but then I thought it was crap. perhaps if I'd rated it I would have thought it was a waste. - 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/
