In the meantime, here are two of my stories that I didn’t get round to posting here:

The Media and The Message (BBC Technology site, 16 December)

Like thousands of other people around the world I’ve just spent £2.39 on The Guardian newspaper’s iPhone app.

I can now read the paper onscreen, with some sections nicely cached for offline browsing and a cleverly designed user interface that lets me put the Media and Technology sections at the top of the paper, mark articles as favourites and quickly find related stories.

And Ten Years After Doomsday (BBC Technology site, 8 December)

I spent the evening of 31 December, 1999 in the company of Rolf Harris, Peter Snow and a large number of other people in a studio at Television Centre in London, seeing in the New Year as the nation’s official Millennium Bug watcher.

As anyone who knows about calendars will tell you, the real millennium didn’t start until a year later, but I was there because of the very real fear that major computer systems around the world would crash because they could not handle the rollover from 1999 to 2000.

My job on New Year’s Eve was to interrupt festivities every hour of the evening to report on what was happening at midnight in different countries around the world.

Merry Christmas to all of you who celebrate such things, Happy Holidays for those who don’t but live in places that do, and ‘have a nice day’ to everyone else…

When I did take on a role as interim publisher at openDemocracy during one of its crises I expressed astonishment that people could schedule meetings for me without actually asking me in advance, and swore never to subject myself to such humiliation in future (or something like that – I may have been drinking at the time).

So it was with some surprise that I found myself seduced by Tony Ageh, the man who brought me on board at The Guardian all those many years ago and who now rejoices in the title of Controller, Archive Development at the BBC, into taking on what many might describe as a ‘proper job’ at the BBC, as opposed to my casual appearances on websites, radio programmes and the odd TV news bulletin. 

For the next six months I will be working part-time as Head of Partnership Development for the BBC Archive Project, working with Tony and the team under Director Roly Keating to build relationships between the BBC and other cultural institutions based around a shared interest in digitisation, standards and practical applications of the enormous archives that form Britain’s cultural history.

I get a desk and a computer on the seventh floor of TV Centre, access to the staff canteen and a chance to bump into Director-General Mark Thompson in the corridor early in the morning as I stagger in to the office, clutching my coffee.  And I get to have some influence on what I believe is the most important project the BBC is currently working on, finding a way to take the vast amount of material that the Corporation has accumulated over the decades and put it to work in our digital world.

This isn’t an editorial role, and I’m not working as a BBC journalist in the way Rory Cellan-Jones does, so I won’t stop working as a freelance and general hack, though the things I write for the BBC will now have to follow editorial guidelines.  I’ll still be giving talks and presentations as an independent commentator, since very little of what I normally talk about overlaps with the work I will be doing on the Archive and I won’t have any public profile in my work for the Archive Project.  I’ll have less time for such things of course, but no less interest in the whole range of issues that have motivated me over the years.

I think it’s important that anyone who seeks a public voice, as I do, is open and transparent about their interests, activities and sources of income, so now you all know what’s going on. I probably won’t be able to write much about what I’m actually up to at the BBC, as most of it is about getting projects and relationships to the point where they can be talked about by other people.  However I’ve set up a new Twitter profile, ‘bbcbillt’, where I’ll tweet about what I’m up to so that I keep it out of my main timeline.

And we’ll see how it goes – I’ll watch the ripples change their size, and perhaps leave the stream of warm impermanence.  Changes, indeed.

Much of the debate that followed last week’s publication of the Digital Britain report has focused on the proposal to take some of the income from the TV Licence and make it available to fund universal broadband access, with a suggestion that once this has been accomplished £130m a year could be used to support local news services and perhaps even children’s programming provided by people other than the BBC.

Within the BBC there is a strong feeling that this would be a very bad idea because the corporation’s resilience comes in part from having a guaranteed source of funding that does not rely on politically-motivated decisions of the government of the day. The fear is that once the licence fee is shared there will be nothing to stop it being carved up to meet short-term policy objectives.

Others share this view. The Guardian’s Polly Toynbee is vehemently opposed to what she calls ‘deliberately breaching the unique status of the BBC’ and asks if the destruction of the BBC is ‘really going to be this Labour government’s legacy?’

The final decision on the TV licence is yet to be made, but the argument about funding the BBC is only one aspect of a much larger debate about public service broadcasting in the UK and how we pay for  television content that is designed to meet specific social and cultural objectives, like news, education and children’s programming.

ITV, Channel 4 and Five all have obligations to provide public service content, and it is hard to see how these commercial broadcasters can meet them as television advertising revenue falls and competition from digital channels and online sources continues to increase.

The scale of the problem is enormous, and was highlighted in a recent report  from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) commissioned by the entertainment union BECTU and the National Union of Journalists, both of whom have many members working in broadcasting.

‘Mind the Funding Gap’ looks at the impact of the switch to digital broadcasting on the main UK channels and estimates that it will leave the commercial public service broadcasters with a funding gap of between £145 and £235 million, although the calculations are based on many assumptions about how much the analogue television spectrum is worth compared to the lower value of a digitally-broadcast channel and are rather more indicative than accurate.

Even if the numbers are uncertain, there is clearly a massive loss of subsidy that, along with the  current reduction in advertising income, has created a genuine crisis in public service broadcasting.

What, then, should be done about it?

Earlier this week I attended a meeting organised by the FEU, the Federation of Entertainment Unions, to discuss ‘New Forms of Funding for Public Service Broadcasting’, and heard from John Smith of the Musicians’ Union, Luke Crawley from the media and entertainment union BECTU and the London Business School’s Professor Paddy Barwise.

The debate covered a range of topics but focused on a proposal in ‘Mind the Funding Gap’ to pay for public service programmes by imposing a one per cent on the turnover of pay television and mobile phone companies, raising around £280m a year.

The argument is a simple one. If a levy on telephone use, as proposed in the Digital Britain report, can be used to pay for next generation broadband, taxing old services to pay for new, why not have a levy on pay television services and mobile phone companies to ensure that providers of public service broadcasting have the same level of public funding in a digital world as they do in the analogue one?

This is such a broken idea that it is difficult to know where to begin to unwind it.  Perhaps the most dangerous assumption is that an always-on digital world will be so similar to the old analogue one that the passive consumption of scheduled television programming will be the only way most people will want to spend their time and so vast amounts of public money must be spent to ensure that it continues to be available.

Instead of investing in innovation and taking advantage of the capabilities that high speed networks offer, finding ways to deliver entertainment and news and education to people wherever they are, with interactivity and options for engagement built in, the old style content providers want to tax network services so they can continue to provide old style content.

They want to keep us all in a world where vast numbers of people spend most of their precious leisure time watching a flat-screen television on which the limits of interactivity are set by an electronic programming guide and, if you’re very lucky, a red button that lets you vote on your most-disliked Big Brother housemate.

Of course the unions want to protect the jobs of their members, and they cannot be criticised for this, but sometimes bad things happen to good people. Many fine writers, including my partner, are suffering because book publishing is going through enormous turmoil, but there is no subsidy on offer to them.

In broadcasting actors are out of work while directors and production crews see budgets cut and funding dry up, and journalists are living with uncertainty. This is happening because the age of television is ending, just as the age of printed textbooks and user manuals is ending, as the age of the hand loom and the wheelwright and the scribe ended before them.  It is a hard change to live through, and those who are only skilled to work in the world of television will inevitably fear it, just as print-only journalists fear the online future.

But this is not a reason to distort the growth of online services in order to give television a few more years. It is an argument for reskilling, for offering funding to innovative services, for building on the ideas of projects like Martin Bright’s ‘New Deal of the Mind’ that are trying to find ways to support and sustain those whose career prospects have been affected by the growth of the internet.

When I was young there was a great children’s TV show called ‘Why Don’t You Just Switch Off Your Television Set and Go and Do Something Less Boring Instead?’, which encouraged viewers to be active and not simply passive viewers of packaged content.  I think it’s time that those involved in television production were asked: Why Don’t You Stop Banging on About Public Service Broadcasting and Go and Make Something Less Boring Instead?

Bill’s Links

Stephen Carter in The Guardian:
FEU meeting:
Ofcom PSB review:
Mind the Funding Gap:
Polly Toynbee in The Guardian:
Why Don’t You:
New Deal of the Mind:
David Mitchell on TV:
TV Licence History:

We live in a largely digitised country, so in one sense the Digital Britain report is an exercise in ensuring that the legal and regulatory system catches up with the lived reality for most of the UK population rather than a visionary document describing a far-distant future.

As such it is a serious attempt to ensure that government makes the best possible use of the network in serving us all, and that businesses offering access to the internet or providing services and content over the network are regulated, rewarded and cajoled as necessary to ensure that the UK does not fall even further behind the rest of the industrialised world.

Although I criticised the interim report when it was published in January because it had been written behind closed doors and offered few opportunities for consultation and engagement for those outside the charmed circle of invited experts, it is clear that Stephen Carter and his team have listened to and taken notice of the extensive debate around their initial proposals. The result, though far from perfect, offers a good basis for work on the detail of implementation and legislation, and there are clear signs that those who want to engage will be able to do so.

There are suggestions for how to liberalise and improve access to wireless infrastructure, with potentially transformative proposals to shake up spectrum allocation to build a next generation mobile network offering 50mbps in cities and 5mbps in rural areas.

There is a confirmed commitment to delivering a universal 2mbps fixed-line broadband service to the whole country by 2012, and a £6 a year levy on existing copper telephone lines to pay for the ‘final third’ next generation coverage if the market cannot deliver. Two megabits per second is too slow for me, but universal service offers so many opportunities for engagement that it’s definitely worth having.

And there may even be ‘cultural tax relief’ for games developers and distributors, on the lines of the model that has made Canada such an attractive place for UK developers to move to.

The report comes on a day when the importance of the internet and the services it supports has been drawn to the attention of the whole world. The protests over the election results in Iran have depended on Facebook, YouTube and of course Twitter to get their message to the world, put pressure on their own government and organise their activities.

Just last week the French Constitutional Council halted the government’s plans to give a new authority the ability to cut the network access of internet users accused of copyright violations because “the Internet is a component of the freedom of expression”, while Prime Minister Gordon Brown wrote in the The Times today that “a fast internet connection is now seen by most of the public as an essential service, as indispensable as electricity, gas and water.”

The view of the network as a utility and as a tool for expression is a very different one from that put forward by the dominant players in the so-called ‘content industry’. Record companies, film studios, newspapers and the TV broadcasters have all lobbied hard for the UK government to shape its internet policy around their interests. They want copyright laws to be strengthened so they can lock up any and all content. They want anyone who dares to challenge their business to be kicked offline, fined and locked up. They want a world in which they control what can happen.

Fortunately that pressure seems largely to have been resisted, and the real thrust of the proposals is about getting everyone online and ensuring that the network is there to be used in ways that support creative expression, new forms of industry and new models of engagement. The Digital Britain of the report is one in which all have access, not one where we try to preserve old industrial models.

When it comes to newspapers the report notes that ‘Digital Britain is at the beginning of a new and possibly disruptive wave of local news, generated by communities for communities using free online media’, and recognises that ‘Government and business will need collaboratively to devise new ways of funding the news’ without simply promising subsidy to the existing players who have failed to adapt to the network reality and have sought protection and subsidy.

The debate about the future of public service broadcasting includes many progressive ideas, and both the decision to make Channel 4 more than just a broadcaster but turn it into ‘the open new media authority providing the seed-corn for creative innovation in the multi-media world’, and the message to the BBC that the license fee does not belong to it are all good ones.

Unfortunately the proposals to limit file-sharing are less well considered and seem to be hopelessly optimistic, or perhaps to betray a naivety about how the internet works. Ofcom is to be asked to oversee efforts by UK ISPs to reduce what they term ‘illegal file-sharing’ by 70%, initially through notifying those accused of downloading material or revealing their names and addresses to rights holders so that they can be prosecuted.

If this doesn’t work then Ofcom may then be granted power to oblige ISPs to limit bandwidth or block specific protocols, presumably in the hope that doing this will deter or stop downloads. But this proposal ignores the fact that work is already going on to develop new file sharing technologies that are encrypted or disguise addresses more effectively. Ofcom might well hit its 70% target just because everyone moves away from BitTorrent without actually reducing the number of files shared over the net.

However the fact that the BPI boss Geoff Taylor found it necessary to accuse the government of ‘digital dithering’ for refusing to allow rights holders to have internet users cut off – the same proposals that have just been thrown out in France – is a good sign indeeed.

In the end public service broadcasting and the protection of the content industries matter far less than the promotion of universal access and the creation of tools and services that encourage everyone online to demonstrate their own creative potential.

A digital britain is not one in which we are all sitting glued to our screens watching the same sort of television programming that we could have had on a cathode-ray set in the 1970’s, downloading blockbuster movies or listening to more dull music made by rich popstars whose only real interest is their property portfolio.

It is one in which universal access allows us all to be fully-fledged citizens of a networked world that offers opportunities for creative expression and communication instead of the passive consumption of packaged content. There’s a glimpse of that world through the Digital Britain report, and it is one that those of us who already live a networked life need to clarify, share and work to build.

Bill’s Links

Digital Britain Report

Gordon Brown in The Times:

BPI unimpressed:

French law:

When I heard that full episodes of The Prisoner TV series were available online I immediately headed over to the AMC website to wallow in nostalgic enjoyment and remind myself just how cool Patrick McGoohan was as he stumbled around Portmeirion trying to avoid a big plastic ball.

I’m old enough to have watched it the first time around and remember the shock we all felt at the last episode, so I was looking forward to revisiting a few episodes without having to make the effort to borrow the full DVD box set from somewhere.

I would happily have watched online and let AMC advertise to me in return, but sadly it was not to be. When I got to The Prisoner page on its site I saw only an unfriendly message, shouting at me in uppercase that:

THE VIDEO YOU ARE TRYING TO WATCH CANNOT BE
VIEWED FROM YOUR CURRENT COUNTRY OR LOCATION

I wasn’t that surprised. My efforts to watch the online-only “webisodes” for Battlestar Galactica, where one of the Cylons is called Number Six in homage to McGoohan, were similarly frustrated.

And the phenomenally successful streaming video service Hulu, home to The Daily Show and 30 Rock, greets me with the joyful news that “currently our video library can only be streamed from within the United States”.

I’m being blocked because my IP address, the unique identifier for my computer on the internet, reveals that I’m a customer of Virgin Media and located in the United Kingdom and whatever deal AMC has made with the owners of The Prisoner only covers the US.

It would be easy to get around this, of course, either by altering the settings on my computer or using one of the third-party services that makes it look like I’m connecting from within the US.

And of course all episodes of The Prisoner are available to download from a variety of unlicensed sources, so all AMC’s restrictions are doing is depriving me of the adverts they’d like to show along with the programmes.

This is not just a US phenomenon, and the BBC is one of the main offenders here in the UK, making every effort possible to ensure that TV and radio programmes are only available online to those actually in the country who qualify as “licence fee payers” and are therefore judged to be entitled to them.

Oddly enough you don’t have to pay for a television licence to count, as the BBC’s Charter is clear that its services should be provided to anyone in the UK who might benefit from them, so tourists are welcome.

And of course one side-effect is that people who have actually paid their TV licence can’t watch iPlayer programmes when they are abroad for holiday or business. Perhaps the idea is that it balances out, so for every visitor from Indonesia watching Top Gear there’s a frustrated advertising executive in Barcelona having to settle for Telemundo.

Regional restrictions are not limited to television programmes. Spotify is one of the more interesting online music services with a massive library of songs from a wide range of artists that can be streamed to your PC, offering a great alternative to music radio.

You can listen for free, with occasional ads, or pay for an ad-free service, but even before its public launch – at the moment you can only sign up if you have an invitation code – Spotify has had to limit who can listen to some songs because the record labels it has done deals with do not have world-wide rights.

We are seeing the negative impact of deals made long before the internet created a global market of over a billion people who care little for the artificial boundaries between “North America” and “EMEA” created by the old generation of content providers.

We have to replace practices that come from a time when lines drawn on a map represented real boundaries between markets, and not limit innovation because the world has changed in ways that were not properly anticipated by rights holders.

After all, these restrictions are not the result of different laws or community standards, but commercial choices made by companies, and they can be remade if the commercial will is there.

When will the content companies realise that I am not an IP number, I am a free man – and a potential customer, no matter where I am in the world.

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If you live outside the United Kingdom then the BBC website at bbc.com has a surprise for you, in the form of some prominent advertisements.

While the license-fee supported sites provided to the UK population remain free of ads, the BBC has started treating the web in the same way as it does the TV channels it broadcasts around the world by trying to generate revenue from them.

So far it seems to be going well. Speaking at a recent media conference in London John Smith, chief executive of the corporation’s commercial arm BBC Worldwide, said that they had underestimated the amount of money they could make online, and that their target of getting 10% of total revenue from internet activity was too low.

Although the BBC are thinking about offering a subscription model too, asking people outside the UK to pay for access to an ad-free version of the site, the team at Worldwide seem to believe advertising is the best and simplest approach.

They are not alone.

The Corbis photo library has just announced plans to let bloggers use their photos for free as long as they allow them to carry ads, while YouTube continues to roll out its ‘invideo’ service, providing ads overlaid on selected videos.

Yahoo! has even found a way to put context-dependent adverts into PDF documents so that people who like to download and read longer documents can’t escape the commercials.

In the media world newspapers like The New York Times, The Financial Times and probably the Wall Street Journal are bringing down their paywalls and turning to adverts to pay the rent, while Microsoft is experimenting with an ad-supported version of its Works software.

The growth of the internet, and the availability of content, services and even software, would seem to depend on the continuing stream of advertising revenue that flows across the network, much of it passing through Google’s rainbow-coloured hands on its way, letting them continue to grow richer ‘one nickel at a time’, as journalist John Battelle puts it.

This growing reliance on advertising over other forms of income carries with it the same dangers as any other dependency on a single source of revenue in business.
While it is unlikely that Google, Microsoft or Yahoo! will vanish, changes to their business models could threaten the deals which currently keep many sites alive.

But the real problem is that the flow of funds into the advertising networks could diminish, especially if there is an economic downturn.  ZenithOptimedia claims that  advertisers will spend an astonishing $448bn worldwide in 2007, but even if this level is maintained it may not be enough.

Blogger and journalism teacher Jeff Jarvis believes that changes in the advertising model and a move from paid ads to other forms of communication are likely to mean that  “there won’t be enough to support us in media in the manner to which we’ve become accustomed”.

He goes on to reflect that  “it’s hard to imagine what other business models will come along to fund us”, especially when charging for content seems to be unacceptable to readers, viewers and users.

There is another, deeper question to ask here, one concerning the audience.

Partly, I suspect, because I grew up in the days before there was any online advertising at all I don’t click on ads very often, except occasionally when I’m doing a very specific product search and a relevant ad appears.

Of course clicking isn’t the only way for a website to make money out of the adverts that appear, of course. Television adverts have been rather successful without any immediate way of generating a viewer response because they raise awareness of brands, products and services, and this also works online.

The impression generated isn’t always positive. I’m certainly aware of the Experian credit agency because it has wallpapered my Facebook profile to the extent that I now resent their mere existence. However other brands may do better out of the banner ads that fill this and other social-networking sites.

But the vast majority of websites rely on pay-per-click advertising deals and are less concerned with brand awareness than direct sales leads.  My own blog has generated a whopping $70 of income from Google ads in the last two years, so I’m aware of the importance of this to small businesses.

In a fascinating post on her blog sociologist danah boyd (her spelling) reflects on some recent research from a study carried out by AOL into US web behaviour that indicated that the few people who do click on ads are far from typical. The survey found that around 0.2 percent of web users are ‘heavy clickers’ and they are older, mostly female and predominantly from the Midwest. They like to click on competitions and sweepstakes.

danah, in her best academic style, suspects that ‘heavy ad clickers in social network sites and other social media are more likely to trend lower in both economic and social capital than the average user’, which translates into ‘poor, isolated working class people click more ads’.

A lot more research is needed here, but we must face up to the irony that our favourite websites may well be being paid for by the poor, rather like the way many of the middle class’s favourite cultural institutions are supported by the predominantly working class purchasers of tickets for the National Lottery.

Bill’s Links

BBC Worldwide ad revenue

YouTube ads:  and discussion 

Corbis offers ads:  and here

Ads in PDFs

John Battelle on Google

Jarvis on advertising

danah boyd on ads