Paying for BBC programming twice. It's an interesting subject, and I've commented on another blog that this issue rises because of an ambiguity of what is actually being sold by the BBC, in this case through iTunes. With DVDs and videos before them you were buying the material to own because you loved the series or the show and wanted to own it with all the special features and comedy offcuts. The iTunes plan blurs the world between iPlayer where people are supposed to be able to watch again for free and that same ownership. I can watch something for 7 days but on the 8th I have to buy it to catch up. It's essentially that segment of the population that might hear about something too late to catch it on iPlayer but doesn't plan on waiting for the DVD to see if it's any good and worth watching as it runs on the TV.

I personally think the BBC is perfectly within its rights to sell its content as it always has done, and as long as it's clear about the permanency of such sales, as if they were DVDs for example, then people have little to complain about that practice.

What I feel this truly could be a cause for complaint, and is worth discussing, is just how true the claim of bandwidth and storage costs are in this argument. Storage really is quite a pittance when weighed up against all of the other costs in a business and one way or another the BBC must store pretty much everything it makes (though perhaps not digitally, I agree). Stock footage, keeping things to be produced for DVD, film ready for repeats, etc, etc. Perhaps it is time that the BBC consolidated its storage, if it hasn't already, to make dual purpose out of such a scheme? Not only could they keep all of their archives intact digitally with back ups but they could then also allow it to be used in showing online. No additional cost therefore to actually store thing to show via the net.

And then you have bandwidth, and this assumes that bandwidth too is too expensive, or that indeed the only way for iPlayer to deliver content is peer-to-server connections. I commend what iPlayer does in letting people stream TV shows for 7 days, I think the ease of access is great and is really flexible. How long that will go on without an additional charge going on our license fee for it I don't know, but for now it's a bit of a bargain. But why after these 7 days does the magic have to stop?

Peer to peer technology exists solely for the reason that in the modern age with bandwidth costs being what they are and upload speeds not being truly amazing, sharing the load of downloading content is a great solution. Why is it that BBC iPlayer doesn't roll out it's scheme for downloading content via peer to peer? The costs would be negligible once the system was up and running, with far less total downloads needing to occur across BBC bandwidth than under older systems, and it would allow people to truly delve in to the past of BBC programming. I wouldn't want to cast aspersions on the general populace but I doubt there would only be a few people that would take pride in being key contributors to the effort of redistributing BBC content through the iPlayer system, especially if a discount in their license fee reflected this effort.

The answer as to why not isn't apparent, but given that what you download expires after a month I would assume that BBC does have a commercial brain in its bonce it isn't afraid to use and realises that getting people to buy their stuff is better than giving it to them for free. What that ignores though is those very people I talked about at the top of this post, those that don't manage to recap everything they want to check out in just one week, and it also ignores growing studies that show a correlation between file sharing and increased sales of goods, at least in the music industry.

I would say that Iain Dale's analysis was knee jerk, and it was ill judged. That is not to say though that there isn't a point to be made under this all, we do pay for this content to be produced and as technology moves on should we not have some kind of right to develop a reasonable time frame, a time frame that could be 7 days or 7 months, to allow people to access what they've paid for? I'm not going to advocate the destruction of the commercial arm of the BBC but the grey area between owning and simply wishing to view content we have already funded is murkier than making ill judged comparisons between the opportunities and potential expectations of new technology and shoplifting DVDs.