It’s unfortunate that the BBC feel the need to spend money on bandwidth simulcasting to a fairly niche subset of its audience when it still hasn’t got around to providing digital terrestrial to the not insubstantial number of homes that still cannot receive it. It’s also worth remembering that the BBC’s venture into digital was only possible because of the failure of a commercial player to get the model to work correctly (by paying far too much for soccer rights). License fee payer’s would be better served by the BBC letting the commercial players get burned first rather than insist on gambling with money that could be better spent on a potentially higher return project (in terms of uk education for example) like the digital curriculum.
It’s also a moot point that it is likely that not much more than 50% of UK households will get internet access of any kind let alone broadband or its replacement variants. It’s indicative of the BBC’s general attitude to the majority of its license fee payers – “hey we are committed to allowing all and sundry internet access to our content around the globe at the expense of program making”. BBC Tech Direction (the BBC’s “blue sky” thinking department) have got the ear of the DG and will do all the politicking they can to justify this highly risky and expensive pioneering into the unknown at the expense of the traditional content producers who are in the process of being “outsourced” to the independent sector to get the cost down.
Agreed that some online projects have been a critical success such as the radio player (forgoing the criticism of the relationship with Real on the player), but again we hit the issue of penetration into the uk audience and whether the cost justifies the audience. Government committees are sceptical themselves but senior management at the BBC seem hell bent on an internet based digital future as soon as possible at all costs and this is extremely worrying as it’s behaving like an aggressive start-up organisation with lots of VC money to burn which it certainly hasn’t. Don’t get me started on the plans to move regionally (half a billion on a new centre in Manchester for sport when the Olympics will be in London in 2012? – jeez)
This announcment will get a huge amount of positve response from primarily non uk license fee holders who will want this model to be available for themselves (without the license) which simply will never happen. Sadly all this positive press will simply make Senior BBC management even more bullish than they are already about the internet and related technologies – definitely not a good thing in the long run.