Britain’s web 2.0 future is in the hands of idiots

So my first proper blog is mostly to test out the limits of WordPress and to try to figure out all these little features and widgets and niggles and trinkets. However, seeing as I’m here, I might as well also use it to go on a bloody great rant about “Digital Britain” and its various spin-off issues, and how the people frequently speaking about it in the press are out-of-touch with the realities of the situation. I like to call them “berks”. It’s an under-used insult and one that I feel is nicely appropriate.

Not to be confused with this Berk, who I'm actually rather fond of.

Ostensibly the irritation that has prompted this post has been caused by an article on the BBC website today; a website and organisation that I’ve got a lot of time for, in all honesty. The BBC gets a lot of crap from a lot of commentators but when it comes to leading from the front, at least in a web 2.0 sense, they do a pretty bloody good job. BBC iPlayer is a tremendous addition to an already impressive website, and something that I appreciate being made readily available to me as a license-fee payer despite not having a TV aerial that works. I like being able to watch Top Gear at 11pm, on my computer, while simultaneously playing Football Manager and chatting to friends on Skype and MSN. It’s 2009; men can multi-task now, as long as it doesn’t require us to take our faces away from just the one screen.

However, some berks have today said that the corporation should start to charge for catch-up programming on iPlayer á la iTunes. Now, I realise that hundreds of post-Y2K products having a lower-case ‘i’ in front of them so that they sound more 21st Century is getting slightly confusing and that we also live in a world where making money is most people’s ultimate aim. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t trying to make as much money as possible at every opportunity possible while exerting the least effort possible, and these people are exactly the same. However, they seem to have not only missed the point entirely, but also I would suggest have totally made up some “research” to support their views.

Here is one berk...

Lorraine Heggessey, CEO of Talkback Thames (the illustrious company that brought us such “entertainment” gems as WAGs Boutique and Dale’s Supermarket Sweep) and Steve Hewlett, a man whose views I generally agree with despite him being associated with The Guardian but who has got it all wrong this time, both think that the rich, undertaxed general populous of Britain should be made to pay for catch-up online programming like that found on iPlayer.

The fundamental problem with this is that it’s not a viable way for them to make money – and let’s get this straight, they’re not thinking about the BBC’s revenues when they suggest that iPlayer should charge for shows. Heggessey in particular knows full well that her company can’t start trying to charge for catch-up programmes online if the BBC don’t set the precedent. Not that I can believe anyone would pay to see a repeat of Minder.

However along with some gems from Hewlett* comes some startling research from Fremantle Media, who are by complete coincidence the company that own Hennessey’s Talkback Thames. The research apparently concludes, and I quote,

“Research carried out by Fremantle suggests that people would be willing to pay up to £2 for certain shows.”

...and here's another

I’d be very keen to find out exactly who was asked and what questions were put to them for Fremantle to come up with this conclusion, because I reckon I could do a straw poll that would blow their research out of the water. My single question would be,

How much would you be prepared to pay to watch BBC TV shows online using iPlayer, bearing in mind that they are currently available online and on BBC television for absolutely nothing?

I’m pretty confident that everyone within a one hundred mile radius would come up with the same answer. The question isn’t what do you think a show is worth, rather, how much are you prepared to pay for them when your license fee means you’ve already paid to watch them on your television? It’s absurd. Some will argue that having catch-up TV still costs more than not, which I appreciate. However the BBC rakes in a good £3.4bn each year from license fees, so I think they can probably just about scrape the barrel. And, to be fair to the corporation, they have said in that same article that they have no plans to start charging for iPlayer content. Quite right too.

ITV aren’t complaining because they stick ads into their catch-up and live online streams, and for me this is the way for companies like Talkback Thames to make their money. By forcing people to start paying for programmes that they are currently getting for free they’re only going to succeed in alienating their online audiences in the pursuit of bottom-line – and this is the absolutely fundamental problem with all the people who are making these ridiculous suggestions about how to police or charge people when they’re using the internet. You can’t just cut people off for downloading things illegally because it’s not that simple, and you can’t just start making people pay for services that they’re currently getting for nothing because the very nature of the web means that there’s almost always some other means of acquiring the material you want. Web 2.0 or whatever you want to call it has so many opportunities for creative people to make money – depressingly, it appears that the people in the media industries that we have revered as being the height of creativity for so long are just as lazy and stupid as the rest of us.

Ooh! Ooh! I've thought an ideas!

The other thing of course is that there’s no sign that catch-up shows being made available online for free is damaging anyone’s revenues; all that’s happening is that some people who don’t think they’ve quite got enough money already have spotted an opportunity to try to squeeze a bit more out of the resources they have available. What they don’t seem to realise is that they’re not ripping off Generation X or the baby boomers any more: they’re dealing with Generation Y here, and we know far more about all this than they do.

*Gems from Hewlett include: “At iTunes prices, I would pay” and “The BBC never thought it was appropriate to give away DVDs, so why should catch-up be free?” Well, perhaps because DVDs cost money to manufacture, burn, package and distribute you cretin?