"These comments confuse me. Is this some kind of Turing test?
I would much prefer the BBC to figure out the bits of the web they do horribly first - like a permanent webpage for every programme and give up blocking content to non-UK Internet users.
My suggestion would be to be for the BBC to have a top 10 list of sites for each genre of output and assign an employee to each to interact with licence fee payers there. Anyone coming to the BBC pages get the list of sites where BBC employee will be participating.
This does a number of very important things: 1. It drives traffic from the BBC to other sites. 2. It moves the moderation headache to sites who get the benefit of BBC traffic. 3. It allows BBC people to participate without having to spend most of the time firefighting turf wars. 4. It cross-polinates to others who may not actively be using the BBC sites. 5. It removes the "dead-hand" feel to the moderation task the BBC has to enforce."
DRM is merely reflective of the rightsholders fear of the underlying technology.
- By using a peer-to-peer system the broadcasters have lost control of their content. - The rightsholders recognise that this superdistribution model is fundamentally different from the broadcast model, in terms of scarce resources, content reproduction and control. - DRM is seen as the panacea.
Spectrum is a scarce resource. There is a limited number of channels broadcasting a broad church of content. With peer-to-peer, as long as one person is willing to host the content then you can have, in effect, a dedicated channel to Doctor_Who.S03E11.MP4, The_Blue_Planet.S01E05.MP4, etc.
With the broadcast model, the broadcaster pumps out the content and moves on. What the person watching does with the content is not part of the pact the broadcasters have with the rightsholders. In a non-Internet world, reproduction on a global scale required a large capital investment. This meant a limited number of broadcasters with whom the rightsholders negotiated. This is no longer the case. Content reproduction and distribution just got "pwned" by the masses. Copyright law is not capable, at the moment, of dealing with the DRM-free P2P model. Rightsholders have no means of dealing with this new model and so seek to impose a technological control solution on top of the new distribution architecture.
So DRM is seen as a means of restricting content reproduction and imposing control on the distribution - in effect creating an artificial scarce resource.
The mistake the broadcasters have made is in believing in the underlying P2P technology without fully getting buy-in from the rightsholders (and a change copyright law - a task best left to the "pirates" who won't get sued out of extinction). DRM and cross-platform issues are merely manifestations of the underlying issues.
There are other technological solutions to replace P2P. I believe this will happen. We will then look back on this period as a glorious failure by the broadcasters in trying one technology, which was ultimately supplanted by a better technological solution (cf Baird's 240 line broadcasts versus Marconi's 405 line system)."
Any parallels to be drawn with the HD channel's strategy? I'll let you decide.