Democratic Underground - Also mentioned in Mark Thompson's speech on Saturday

at the Edinburgh TV festival:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/speeches/stories/thompson_edinburgh05.shtml

which seems to be about how the BBC will pursue a digital distribution strategy to extend the life of TV License funding ("I accept the premise that if the BBC remains nothing more than a traditional TV and radio broadcaster then we probably won't deserve or get licence fee funding beyond 2016. As I've tried to make as clear as I can over the past year, however, that is very definitely not our plan.")

Interestingly, in his speech, Thompson indicates that UK TV licence payers (rather than simply UK residents) will be able to use the "MyBBCPlayer" software.

If we assume all UK Internet users are not to become automatically liable for paying TV licence, I guess that means some kind of "Digital Rights Management" (DRM) system will be used in the new player, to ensure people such as myself, who do not receive broadcast TV and pay no license fee, will cough up the required TV tax before we can make use of the service.

Also in the speech, Thompson hints at scaling back the opening up of some BBC archives to the public under a "Creative Commons" licence which has been enthusiastically reported, for example at http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2004/05_may/26/creative_archive.shtml

Thompson says:

Take the archive, where I know that talk particularly about the creative archive has worried some commercial players. We think it does make sense to open up some of the BBC archive to the public, but we also recognise that rights-holders have significant interests in much of the archive as well.

We recently signed a deal with Universal Music to work together to exploit parts of the BBC music archive where we have shared interests. That's a good model.

Does it make sense to open up as much of our news archive to the public as possible – for information, education or just for private interest? Yes it does. Should we look very closely indeed at how that might impact on, say, ITN's business-to-business news archive business? Yes again. We want to work with ITN and indeed everyone else in the archive space to figure out ways of maximising both the public value and the positive market value of what we can do, while minimising any negative market impact.

The controls which both Governors and Government are putting in place to assess public value before agreeing to new BBC services will be more transparent and objective than anything we've seen before. I have to say that, even if these controls did not exist, I believe that it would be in the BBC's interests to work in collaboration with commercial players.

And later:

We also believe it is right in principle to ensure that rights-holders can continue to enjoy the value of the intellectual property they create and exploit.

But I also believe that these digital rights solutions will exist in a world which is increasingly open and inter-operable and we are working with partners like Microsoft and Kontiki to find them.

Microsoft DRM - Ugh!

On the bright side, the BBC seems still to be actively developing their open source video streaming codec, Dirac ( http://dirac.sourceforge.net/overview.html ) which might feature in the new MyBBCPlayer. Should be an interesting one to watch..

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