On Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 12:56, Sean DALY <sdaly...@gmail.com> wrote: > My understanding is that the BBC's strategy is to treat the UK and > rest-of-world markets differently, with a profit orientation on the > World side. Technical geolocalisation solutions are indeed doomed to > failure in my view. Those sly devils at Google showed me a sponsored > link last week promising international access to UK iPlayer through a > proxy.
Oh, you can do it. People will pay if the product’s of a good standard and not subject to ridiculous delays and impediments. Personally, I’m in favour of liberalising some of the restrictions upon BBCW (provided it doesn’t impact negatively upon the FTA efforts within the UK). People often resort to downloads because they -have- to in order to get the output they want on their terms, rather than because it's free. (Anecdotal personal example: I’m more than capable of downloading films from BitTorrent, and have a dim view much of the movie industry, but I rent movies from iTunes instead—it’s fast, it’s easy, it’s convenient, and it doesn’t cost the earth). > As a former musician and record producer, you'll have no pity from me > for the rapacious vultures of the music biz :-) the daft thing is, much of it’s been so depressingly predictable from very early on. so much of it’s been avoidable. > But I'm speaking generally about digital disruption. The free-to-air > model is now the free-to-world model. I'm actually much more worried > about newspapers. The newspapers are fixable. Perhaps not -as- newspapers in many cases (though you’ll prize my magazine subscriptions from my cold, dead hands), but by becoming far more efficient at collating and redistributing news and—most importantly—the expert commentary on it; the latter being something news.bbc.co.uk only provides minimal amounts of. Free-to-air _can_ be free-to-world, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that it WILL be—that more depends upon the content than anything else (and it doesn’t have to be FTA in the first place, of course). The only real solution, though, is to capitalise on the overseas markets: business models wholly reliant upon it being difficult and uneconomical for consumers (on whichever side of the law) to ship content from one side of the world to the other weren’t ever going to last forever. That was the monopoly period—the breathing space to develop the models and form the alliances and dip toes in waters—which as with any other, has a limited lifespan. M. - 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/
