This morning I interviewed Ashley Highfield, the BBC’s director of new media, for my book about the digital media revolution. Wonderful, and terribly bright, fellow. (He delivered a brilliant speech last fall to the Royal Television Society titled “TV’s Tipping Point: Why The Digital Revolution Is Only Just Beginning.”
I’ve decided to do something with my book that I haven’t seen done elsewhere (although I’m sure someone has tried this), and that’s to post the complete interviews of a couple of dozen of the people I’ve interviewed to the web site that will accompany the book. So, I won’t be posting the complete interviews yet, but when I run across something that seems topical or particularly interesting, I’ll post an excerpt early. Which is what I’ll do here.
First, a word about the interview. I spoke with Ashley over an Internet phone (Vonage VoIP line), from the San Francisco East Bay to his offices in London. This, after using a land line for my interview with Ian Clarke netted me a $163 phone bill. This time around, it should run under $10. And the voice clarity was just as good.
Now, a quick excerpt from Ashley’s comments:
You said in your speech, ‘We need to help consumers leapfrog the illegal downloading issues that have wrecked havoc on the music industry.’ How do you do that?
We start from the end. This is not easy, but we start from the blanket licensing end and try to block cover all of our content so that the users who register don’t need to worry about rights. Clearly it means we have to worry about DRM standards and players like Microsoft, but the onus is on us to go to all our rights holders and go through the massive uphill of negotiating blanket agreements. We’ve done it in radio and we’re making pretty good progress with IMP, our Internet Media Player. The idea is that we’re going to offer all our programming, up to a week after transmission, for downloading over the Internet. And thus create a new window for all our programming. The only way to do that is to blanket clear all of our content for Internet distribution.
That sounds similar to the Creative Commons clearance licenses.
The Creative Commons licenses will help, but it doesn’t stop us from having to actually go back to the individual rights holders as well.
In the States we have tremendous barriers put up by the media companies, which don’t see such change as being in their financial interests. On this side of the Atlantic, who’s going to help consumers to become producers and creators of video programming?
That’s not an easy call, is it? I don’t know how long the media players can hold out against the demand for this. I think it’s similar to ripping and sharing of music files, and what’s held it back for 50 years has been bandwidth limitations. As broadband penetration increases, this is just gonna happen. And media companies are just going to have to find a way to adapt.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
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