Big Brother boss says: Kill off TV news to fund my Chirac-style folly

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 23 April 2008 at 17:18
Tags: BBC, BBC Worldwide, BSkyB, Google

Whatever happened to David Elstein?

Once upon a time, Elstein was head of programmes at Sky. As part of his job, he regularly called for the abolition of the licence fee.

In the market for ideas, Elstein’s purpose was to say the unthinkable — and get it incorporated into debate, to his employer’s advantage.

These days, Peter Bazalgette, the former public school boy responsible for a raft of trash TV, including Big Brother, seems to have taken Elstein’s place.

There’s only one slight problem. Like a lot of blokes in their mid-50s who have made lots of money from Big Media, the founder of Endemol hasn’t got much of a clue about the emerging digital universe.

At a Royal Television Society dinner last night, Bazalgette blithely called (among other things) for the government to abolish the news and current affairs obligations of both Five and Channel 4

By doing this, both channels would (presumably) become cheaper to produce and more popular.

HM Government, Bazalgette suggested, could then cream off some of the resulting expansion in profits by charging both channels for their use of digital (Freeview) spectrum.

In addition, Bazalgette proposed the privatization of BBC Worldwide, BBC Radio 1 and 2 and Channel 4.

After raising £3bn+ from such ruses, Bazalgette wants the government to launch something called, er, Boggle.

What Bazalgette has in mind is a “public service distribution platform and search engine”.

And its purpose? As Bazelgette sketchily framed it, Boggle would “link the existing online offerings of museums, galleries, theatre companies, opera houses and concert halls”.

It would also give all of these venues “seedcorn monies” to “improve” their “content offerings”.

But that’s not all. Boggle would also allow the “next generation of comedy talent” to post videos. The most popular would attract “some Boggle funding”. Last but not least, Boggle would create “a search engine to market it all”.

Confronted with this dim-witted slew of half-baked concepts, it’s hard to know where to start.

“Seedcorn monies” for museums? Fine. A few hundred million wouldn’t go amiss. But do we need a new quango to distribute it? What does the Arts Council do for a living?

Hasn’t Bazalgette heard of YouTube? Remarkably enough, young comics already use it to post videos of their gags. And then there’s Google, which owns a perfectly good search engine already. . .

In his haste to embrace a broadband future that he patently doesn’t understand, Bazalgette — the free market provocateur — actually ends up sounding like former President Chirac, who decided that French taxpayers should foot the bill for a French language search engine designed for French people.

A blizzard of straight-faced reports accompanied Bazalgette’s speech. Somewhere in them, I read that Ofcom will “study” this plan for a new quangocracy whose birth requires the death of much of what remains of news and current affairs on independent television.

Toss it into the nearest litter bin, more like. If this reflects the standard of debate within the TV industry, Big Media is in more trouble than we thought it was.

Come back David Elstein; all is forgiven.

PS: According to his biography on the Royal Television Society web site, Peter Bazalgette is currently “building a portfolio of investments in digital growth companies”. On the evidence of last night’s speech, widows and orphans would be well advised to invest their money elsewhere.

Sky’s crowdsourcing experiment: not so bad

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 29 November 2007 at 12:00
Tags: BSkyB, Media

At Journalism.co.uk, Oliver Luft protests about Sky News’s efforts to crowdsource innovative RSS applications.

Sky is planning to award a prize of at least £1,000 (possibly more) to the winner of its competition. In return, Luft suggests that the company plans to “take quite a bit”. Specifically

– an exclusive royalty free worldwide license in all media in the Finalist’s Contribution for a period of 3 months from the date of the submission

and

– after that 3 month period, Sky shall have a non-exclusive royalty free worldwide license in perpetuity in all media in the Finalist’s Contribution.

Here’s how Luft sees it:

So the position is a news company owned by a billionaire is asking for someone else to design it a cutting edge technological development, for it to use for free, forever?

Well, not exactly for free. There is the prize money. And the chance of selling your genius code to other media companies after the three-month exclusivity period — with an all-important reference customer (Sky) under your belt.

Sky’s terms don’t seem too onerous if you assume that the winner is going to be a teenaged code jockey operating out of his or her bedroom in Croydon. Which is probably a fair assumption.

The way in which Sky will license the winning software leaves copyright with the original coder. This appears to follow the rules laid down by this week’s Pact framework. Two years in the making, Pact lays out a framework of rights for digital content producers who code, or content, for broadcasters.

Luft says it’s similar to the T&Cs offered by Channel 4 in a separate contest. If so, both are a lot better than the terms offered to budding geniuses by The Big What Adventure. This is an attempt at crowdsourcing creative advertising ideas staged by TBWA, the achingly hip ad agency that works for Apple amongst others.

Here are the T&Cs from that effort:

In submitting your user content you understand that TBWA and its clients will be able to use, reproduce, develop, implement, adapt, distribute and promote all user content in any form and in all media, anywhere in the world, for any purpose, without payment to you.

And as if that wasn’t enough:

All intellectual property rights in the content available on thebigwhatadventure belong to TBWA or its licensors. All rights are reserved. No such content may be reproduced without TBWA’s prior written permission.

All of which is rather hilarious given the advertising industry’s long history of plagiarizing other people’s work. In this respect, TBWA’s track record is less than spotless.

As things go, Sky’s offer ain’t so bad. Yes, they could have gussied it up by taking an open source approach to licensing. But in the end, that’s going to be a decision for the code jockey, not Sky News.

More candidates for top job at GCap

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 27 November 2007 at 10:56
Tags: BSkyB, GCAP PLC, Google, United Business Media, emap

At the Guardian, Caitlin Fitzsimmons and John Plunkett have been chatting to headhunters. They’ve come up with a few more candidates for the vacant chief executive’s role at GCap. All are very long shots.

Malcolm Wall, chief executive of Virgin Media’s content division, is one of them. Perhaps this isn’t so surprising, since Virgin Media now seems more interested in super-fast broadband provision than competing head-on with BSkyB.

But Wall looks increasingly like an almost-man. He almost succeeded Clive Hollick at United Business Media. He almost became chief executive of ITV. And he almost got the top job at EMAP when that still meant something. Too many almosts, we think.

Then there’s Shaun Gregory, the former EMAP radio exec who is now UK chief executive of pan-European free mobile operator Blyk (a long shot, given that Blyk only launched a few months ago).

They’re also suggesting Mark Howe, the country sales director at Google UK. (He’d have to be insane, right?)