23 Musings

The BBC have launched their much blogged about, widget based, drag & drop homepage this week.

I gave it a once over while still in beta and my opinion hasn't changed. I love it!

It's a fantastic design job and so easy to use. It's obviously had a usability agency all over it to ensure it meets the needs of as many users as possible too.

A success story for YouTube this week following on from all the takedown requests and lack of commitment from some major US media companies.

The BBC has signed a deal with YouTube to bring specially commissioned content and news clips to the video site. The director general of the BBC, Mark Thompson, said the deal is a ground-breaking partnership between the BBC and YouTube and "fantastic news for our audiences". He added in a statement: "It's essential that the BBC embraces new ways of reaching wider audiences with non-exclusive partnerships such as these."

The main BBC channel on YouTube will include news clips along with short-form promotional content linked to popular programmes such as Doctor Who. Video diaries by stars of the shows - including tours of the sets - will also appear. The BBC Worldwide entertainment channel will show clips from shows such as Top Gear and Spooks, along with factual programmes and a "limited amount of advertising". BBC World will offer around 30 news clips per day to users outside of the UK and will also be funded through advertising.

YouTube has also announced 1000's of deals with small content owners.

Viacom, Fox and NBC however are still staying away. Viacom claims that traffic to it's websites has risen sharply since they had the content and clips pulled down from YouTube (they obviously don't understand the point of cross promotion!). A deal with CBS has also failed to appear, it's all gone very quiet from both camps on this subject.

Ultimately, I'm sure they all really want to get a deal done, it seems YouTube need to come up with a better offering for these media behemoths in order to hook them into their service.

The BBC's foray into YouTube is said to be advertising funded, perhaps that funding is not enough for the large US media companies? Or maybe they are just waiting for some proper copyright protection to come into force?

Vodafone mobile subscribers will soon be able to access and update their MySpace pages on the go according to this BBC story. It's the first joint venture between MySpace and a mobile company, seems a very smart move for both parties. They will then be able to edit their MySpace profiles, post photos and blogs and send and receive MySpace messages.

NTT Docomo were doing this kind of thing ages ago with iMode in Japan so it's good to see the UK catching up with what is a relatively straightforward and easy to use application.

Perhaps something location based would be cool for those GPS users amongst us? Some way of letting your MySpace friends know where you are perhaps?

News today that the BBC has been slated by the Open Source Consortium for it's plans to make it's on demand service work only for users of PC's with Windows (in other words Microsoft). The OSC believes this is anti-competitive, and would be in breach of the broadcaster's charter by using public funds to develop and promote the service.

I totally agree with the OSC. No doubt the BBC will expect anyone watching their on-demand to have paid a license fee so why should some people be excluded? Quite why they can't just develop the software to work on all platforms is beyond me, it's so easy these days to make apps platform independent, seems really narrow minded to exclude a group of users so large as Linux/Mac owners.

Rumours abound that the BBC is in talks with Google about publishing some of it's programming on YouTube and Google Video. Great idea I hear you cry! Why not publish programming after the initial broadcast date? Why not indeed! It'll be great for the BBC, extra global exposure for it's programming and certainly great for Google, as a watch again feature for the BBC would be a huge pull for YouTube. However, doesn't this conflict quite dramatically with the BBC's IPTV ambitions? IPTV, as well as broadcasting simultaneously (as the BBC has reportedly wanted to do) with terrestrial TV would also allow you to watch programmes after they'd broadcast. Now if the BBC is really serious about IPTV, why would they want to publish to YouTube as well? Surely they'd be better off allowing users access to old programming through their own IPTV software?