Thursday, October 18th, 2007
I am sitting in the lobby of a hotel in Sao Paulo watching last night’s edition of Newsnight. I have just scoured BBC News for what is going on round the world and checked out the sport.
Increasingly this is becoming a hit and miss affair as more and more content (particularly video content) is blocked to people outside the UK. What worked last week pulls up an error message this week. It is frustrating as I would gladly pay for key content like I am paying for this internet connection.
I was delighted, therefore to read Richard Sambrook’s Blog where he confirms that BBC Com has approval and will start carying ads from next month for non UK connectors like me. The result will be: income for the BBC and action for me. Win win. If this is successful then the ads will be extended to other pages.
What works for web pages should work for audio and video material. So I hope that the BBC opens much, much more of its content to us poor folk in hotel lobbies around the world. It is all at zero cost to UK licence fee payers as it will be funded by advertsing or even micro subscription. I know it is not a huge priority given what is going on in the BBC currently but it is, nevertheless, important. The BBC is a massive brand world wide and I am not the only one getting more and more frustrated by access being terminated with no alternative provision: a ready made market of affluent consumners who would gladly suffer a few ads to get at good content. And it will put revenue back into the operation to make the service -at the very least- self-funding, but probably increasingly able to generate a profit back to a mother ship that certainly appears to need the odd cash injection.
So thank you Richard and now approval has been granted please don’t hang around.