Posts by Ryan Morrison

Pay per use

Big_Boomer - completely agree. Broadband should be closer to the mobile phone model. If it costs £1.50 (including your profit) per GB per user then charge that user £2.00 per GB.

An ISP could offer a £30 per month package that included 15GB data for high end users or a £10 per month package that includes 5GB of data for low end users.

Either way - we then pay for what we use and people realise the value of bandwidth.

Oh and Ashley Highfield will be missed as head of FM&T he's been good for the Beeb and was the man to put FM&T at the centre of the corporation.

Not the BBCs Copyright

The thing is the BBC don't own ALL the copyright to (more or less) any of their TV programmes.

The BBC buy the rights to show it on TV a certain number of times and have an agreement that lets them make it available for up to seven days online but their deal doesn't extend beyond that.

Basically for every TV show every piece of music played has several rights holder, the writer retains rights, the actors all retain the right to claim repeat fees - even conductors on musical score retain certain rights.

None of those groups would let the BBC offer any TV show without DRM as offering it without DRM is the same as offering it forever and that would reduce the fees they get for DVD sales.

The IP restriction is there to stop people outside the UK using the iPlayer - in the same way FOX, Disney, NBC, ABC et al stop me using their on demand services over here - it's not directly anything to do with rights.

I agree that the BBC would be better to create their own open source DRM solution that would work cross platform - maybe they could work with ITV and Channel 4 to create one all UK broadcasters can use?

P2P Next

Open Source 'fans' might be interested in this post on the BBC Internet Blog then - about a new P2P network being developed in part by the BBC to deliver Television over the internet.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2008/02/p2p_next.html