Clearly the BBC needs the space to evolve as audiences and technologies develop, but it must be far more explicit than it has been in the past about what it will not do. Its commercial activity should help fund and actively support the BBC’s public mission, and never distort or supplant that mission.
Where actual or potential market impact outweighs public value, the BBC should leave space clear for others. The BBC should not attempt to do everything. It must listen to legitimate concerns from commercial media players more carefully than it has in the past and act sooner to meet them. It needs the confidence and clarity to stop as well as to start doing things.

Why such negativity? The essence of the problem is that the BBC has been too successful for some. Commercial broadcasters and web sites have to compete with an organisation that is publically funded, and complain that it is unfair competition. The BBC demonstrates the effectiveness of the subscription model, especially when that subscription is all-but compulsory. In the UK, you have to pay the licence fee if you have equipment capable of receiving its TV broadcasts.

My main interest is in the BBC website. It is one I use constantly, and I do not think there is anything like it in the world. It offers comprehensive news, features and comment, on a site that is fast and resilient, and without the irritation of advertising. For example, if I want to know the latest state of play in financial markets, I head straight to the BBC’s Market Data page.

The absence of advertising has several benefits. First, it increases confidence in the neutrality of the site. Second, it improves performance – I’m aware that my own blog is slowed down by ad scripts, for example, and I’m not happy about it; but I’m also trying to make business sense out of running the site. Third, it improves usability in other ways, with less distraction and increased space for content. Note though that the BBC site does carry advertising when viewed from non-UK locations.

The BBC web site is an enormous success, the 44th most visited in the world according to Alexa, and the top news site (cnn.com is next at 61) unless you count Yahoo, which is something different to my mind.

So what do you do with a world leader? Cut it, apparently. The report talks about “focusing” the BBC web site by:

• Halving the number of sections on the site and improving its quality by closing lower-performing sites and consolidating the rest
• Spending 25% less on the site per year by 2013
• Turning the site into a window on the web by providing at least one external link on every page and doubling monthly ‘click-throughs’ to external sites

This is made more explicit later in the report:

• To help ensure that this refocusing takes place, the BBC will spend 25% less on BBC Online by 2013, with a corresponding reduction in staffing levels
• The number of sections on the site (its ‘top-level directories’, in the form bbc.co.uk/sitename) will be halved by 2012, with many sites closed and others consolidated
• New investment will be in pursuit of the five content priorities only, and there will be far fewer bespoke programme websites
• BBC Online will be transformed into a window on the web with, by 2012, an external link on every page and at least double the current rate of ‘click-throughs’ to external sites.

There is an even more explicit section on BBC Online further down (pages 36-37) – the report seems to say the same thing several times with more detail on each iteration – but I won’t quote it all here. I will note that the sections identified for removal are not ones that matter to me, with the possible exception of local news:

Restricting local sites in England to news, sport, weather, travel and local knowledge (where ‘local knowledge’ means supporting BBC initiatives such as Coast and A History of the World in 100 Objects where there is local relevance, but not general feature content)

I do understand the problem here. Consider, for example, UK newspaper sites like the excellent guardian.co.uk – disclaimer – there are a few of my own contributions there. Such sites do not really make money, because they depend on synergy with print media that is in decline, not least because of advertisers turning to the web. There is a big debate in the media industry about whether to charge subscriptions for sites like these, as the New York Times has done, and will do again. However, the existence and quality of the BBC’s free site significantly impairs the prospects for subscriptions to UK newspaper sites.

This, I presume, is why the BBC intends to increase the number of external links; a small compensation for its unfair advantage.

Nevertheless, I think the BBC is mad to consider reducing its online investment. It is against the trend; the web is rising in importance, and traditional broadcasting decreasing. It is bad for the UK, for which the BBC is excellent PR and a genuine service to the world. It is bad for subscribers such as myself, enforced or not, who want the online service to get better, not worse.

Rather than cutting back on the BBC’s most strategic services, I’d favour looking again at the way the BBC is funded and what happens to the licence fee, which is an anomaly. I don’t see any reason in principle why it should not be shared with other organisations that are serving the public interest in news and media.

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There is a detailed comment from the BBC’s Sam Dutton on why the proof of concept was put together here. There is an interesting remark on why the BBC is interested in this approach, which does not require a plugin like Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight:

Flash and other Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) provide something like this already via timeline scripting, but RIAs are ‘black boxes’, using compilers and obfuscators to hide code and data: great if you want to protect intellectual property, whereas we needed to provide a mechanism whereby data and the code acting on it were open and accessible. HTML 5 and the jQuery JavaScript framework gave us the tools we needed without requiring extra plugins or proprietary software.

From a technical perspective, Dutton remarks that the HTML 5 solution is more efficient if you want to synchronize other elements with the playing video:

The HTML 5 audio and video elements remove the need for player plugins, work like any other HTML element in terms of styling and positioning, and standardise the programming interface for playback control. Less well known is that these elements emit a timeupdate event (at a frequency adjusted to fit available processing and memory) which removes the need to poll a player for the current time position. This makes media scripting far more efficient, since there is no need to run a loop or use setTimeout. In tests run on several machines we found that timeupdate events are emitted regularly and frequently (particularly in Firefox), whereas polling a media player for current video time is unreliable.

Dutton adds:

… it’s early days for us on this and there are a number of serious challenges before this becomes anything near mainstream – if ever.

The BBC is an influential site and its experiments will attract keen interest from those watching the evolution of web video.

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Although the cover stated “Europe’s first magazine for personal computers for home and business use”, PCW was really an enthusiast’s publication; and in those days being a computer enthusiast meant being relatively technical and willing to do your own programming.

The story of personal computing is about how these devices evolved from a geeky hobby into a tool and plaything for everyone; and the magazine morphed accordingly, becoming steadily more mainstream as time went by.

The early years were particularly engaging, thanks to the variety of new devices that appeared and disappeared with bewildering speed. Some had more staying power than others, like the 1981 BBC micro, for example:

One of my favourite PCW covers was that for Windows 3.0 in 1990. Sub-titled Child’s Play, it was prophetic in identifying how Microsoft’s OS would bring personal computing to the masses.

It was Windows which inspired my first piece for PCW, a massive survey of 17 Windows database managers in May 1993. Not long after I reviewed Visual Basic 3.0, correctly predicting that its built-in data access would make it popular in businesses. I went on to do a series of Visual Basic tutorials, and then a programming column that evolved from Visual Basic to all things related to software development.

Last year PCW celebrated its 30th anniversary.

So why has it ended? According to this Press Gazette post:

Managing director of Incisive’s professional services division Graham Harman said … "Sadly, no amount of hard work or innovation was going to turn around the structural decline in advertising and newsstand sales. The depth of this recession and the ease of access to information online has only served to accelerate the long term downward trend within this particular sector.”

PCW’s last published circulation figure (Jan-Dec 2008) was 54,000, which is respectable, and more than double that of some rivals, like Future’s PC Plus which recorded just over 22,000 for the same period. The bigger problem, as you will see if you browse through a recent issue, is the decline in advertising. Before the days of the world wide web, magazines like PCW were critically important to computer manufacturers and retailers, but that is no longer the case.

Another problem, as one of the editors explained to me a few years back, is that PCW found itself caught between the demands of an aging readership which had grown up with the magazine, and that of a new generation.

It still has a considerable reputation and I’m surprised that the publishers have not found a way to make it work for a little longer, though the long-term trends have been against it for years.

Still, it has had a good run, and no doubt future researchers will have a lot of fun going though its archives as they explore the days when computing became personal for the first time.

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They are talking about video on bbc.co.uk. Previously this has been handled through pop-up pages that give a choice between Windows Media Player and Real Media. The BBC will now be standardising on Adobe Flash video, embedded in the page rather than in a pop-up. Their research has found that embedded video has a much better click-through than the pop-up style. It also has editorial implications, because it is better integrated into the page. In due course, Flash will be the sole public format (an archive is also kept in some other format).

There is going to be increasing video on the site. Apparently the BBC is getting better at negotiating rights to video content, and we can expect lots of video from this year’s Olympics, for example.

As far as I can tell, this has nothing to do with iPlayer, the service which offers the last 7 days of broadcasting online. This is mainly about short videos of news content.

Incidentally, I’m disappointed that we are not getting more detail on the rebuilding of the web platform about which I posted earlier, though it has been mentioned in passing as a move to dynamic publishing. That was more interesting to me, and perhaps more in tune with what Qcon is about. Still, this is worthwhile as well.

Technorati tags: bbc, flash, windows media, real player

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I was aware of writing for a global readership, but was surprised at the extent of it: according to these figures, just 8.1% of you are from the UK. In case you can’t see the chart, it shows 43.4% US visits, followed by the UK as stated, then Australia and Canada at 7.1% each.

At Sun’s Global Media Summit recently, we were separated into regions for one of the sessions. In my feedback I said I was more interested in the global perspective; the above chart shows why.

After all, this is the Internet.

Update

Sitemeter doesn’t say exactly what period its stats cover (at least, I can’t find this). It seems to be quite short, so the stats vary considerably. The chart above understates the UK readership and therefore overstates others. I’d have to take several snapshots at different times to get a truer picture. Still interesting though.

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