The Times comment page: 'Lost', a BBC internet drama
By David Rowan
IT REMAINS unclear which of the voluminous "Mark Thompson" profiles clogging MySpace, the social-networking website, represents the BBC Director-General's authentic personal voice: the milk-craving trainee tattoo artist from Bishop Auckland, the Dr Dre fan seeking love in Basingstoke, or perhaps the "average-looking" singer-songwriter who bluntly acknowledges "zero friends".
The genuine DG, should he Google himself when next searching for websites for the BBC to emulate, will be shocked to find himself similarly friendless amid the icy digital winds of his peers' hostility. But is it any wonder that Thompson is gathering enemies when his internet strategy amounts to a gigantic licence-fee-funded HisSpace designed to squeeze established commercial online ventures?
The private sector has long railed against the corporation's supposed market distortions. Some of these complaints are justified, such as on-screen promotion of profit-making BBC magazines; others, denouncing quality programming that wins ratings, less so. But Thompson has surpassed himself since announcing his "Creative Future" strategy in April as his blueprint for the next six years of growth. Now, he suggests, the BBC "is the only European brand that could take on Google and AOL". Using a licence settlement of 2.3 per cent above inflation for each year of its new charter, Thompson wants to play at being Google's Sergey Brin and Larry Page and AOL's Steve Case all in one.
It would breach the highest standards of the new BBC College of Journalism to suggest that it will be licence-payers who will be funding this new dot-commery. Officially, it will be BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm, that will be offering the video-on-demand that will send the online giants shuddering. Yet won't the shows enticing these online audiences have been developed and financed by our licence fees, due to exceed £180 by 2014? On this reasonable assumption, we fee-payers might ask where are the "public value tests" that the corporation must apply under its updated charter before launching new services. Thompson might also want to wait for Ofcom's requisite "market impact assessments" before he signs for all those new web servers.
In plot terms comprehensible to broadcast executives, we're talking Lost. In its exemplary drive to innovate and meet new audience demands in this barely begun digital revolution, the corporation is in danger of forgetting its core mission: to produce programming that must "inform, educate and entertain". Nowhere did the original charter suggest that Auntie should build empires such as those now envisaged for their own sakes. There is little evidence of consumer dissatisfaction with existing web search sites and media portals such as Google, AOL and Yahoo!, so the BBC would not be filling a particular market gap by starting another. Nor, with plenty of businesses already offering homes for citizens' own creativity - from YouTube to Flickr for video and photographs - is it clear why a publicly funded competitor needs to come along and paddle other innovators' canoes.
This is not to say that all the changes planned lack public-service value. Thompson is right to understand that audiences now want to access their "content" (a technical term for Doctor Who and EastEnders) "in whatever media and on whatever device makes sense for them, whether at home or on the move".
Credit to him too for seeking to make programmes that we have already funded more widely available to watch at our leisure and even "mash up" on our computers. But the vacuity and ill-considered logic of his online expansion plans become clear as you sink somnolently into the "Creative Future" strategy documents. Their painfully unfocused jargon, redolent of the press-release guff churned out by hopeless hi-tech start-ups circa 1999, suggests that in Beebland, too, a desire to impress corporate bosses masks a fundamental lack of clarity about the ultimate goal.
In the documents you will discover Thompson's zeal for "pan platform knowledge building", his hunger to prioritise his shows' "findability" by "cracking metadata labelling", his concern to "rebalance the Knowledge Building portfolio to increase its relevance, responsiveness and modernity, increasing development towards underserved audiences and maximising ideas which have real scale and impact". No, that's not a spoof. Ten "cross-divisional teams" have been working on this stuff for a year.
In the brutal commercial marketplace, the BBC's rivals are justifiably clamouring to limit its online intrusions. Thompson may well reject as self-interested the protests of this newspaper's parent company, which last year spent $580 million (£324 million) to acquire MySpace. He may also brush aside the predictable complaint by Charles Allen, at ITV, that his licence-fee demands rely on "back-of-a-fag-packet figures [which] should come with their own health warning".
Yet they are only two of an unprecedentedly wide alliance now forming to curtail the BBC's "digital empire-building", which includes commercial radio stations, national and local newspapers, internet publishers and most recently the Conservative Opposition, concerned, as David Cameron put it, to prevent the BBC over-extending itself and "squishing [private businesses] like a big foot on an ant".
It's an image that recalls an excellent public-service BBC documentary that David Attenborough once made about ants. Mark Thompson might remember it, too - if he can think back to his pre-internet-mogul days.
(The Times comment page, June 3 2006)
IT REMAINS unclear which of the voluminous "Mark Thompson" profiles clogging MySpace, the social-networking website, represents the BBC Director-General's authentic personal voice: the milk-craving trainee tattoo artist from Bishop Auckland, the Dr Dre fan seeking love in Basingstoke, or perhaps the "average-looking" singer-songwriter who bluntly acknowledges "zero friends".
The genuine DG, should he Google himself when next searching for websites for the BBC to emulate, will be shocked to find himself similarly friendless amid the icy digital winds of his peers' hostility. But is it any wonder that Thompson is gathering enemies when his internet strategy amounts to a gigantic licence-fee-funded HisSpace designed to squeeze established commercial online ventures?
The private sector has long railed against the corporation's supposed market distortions. Some of these complaints are justified, such as on-screen promotion of profit-making BBC magazines; others, denouncing quality programming that wins ratings, less so. But Thompson has surpassed himself since announcing his "Creative Future" strategy in April as his blueprint for the next six years of growth. Now, he suggests, the BBC "is the only European brand that could take on Google and AOL". Using a licence settlement of 2.3 per cent above inflation for each year of its new charter, Thompson wants to play at being Google's Sergey Brin and Larry Page and AOL's Steve Case all in one.
It would breach the highest standards of the new BBC College of Journalism to suggest that it will be licence-payers who will be funding this new dot-commery. Officially, it will be BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm, that will be offering the video-on-demand that will send the online giants shuddering. Yet won't the shows enticing these online audiences have been developed and financed by our licence fees, due to exceed £180 by 2014? On this reasonable assumption, we fee-payers might ask where are the "public value tests" that the corporation must apply under its updated charter before launching new services. Thompson might also want to wait for Ofcom's requisite "market impact assessments" before he signs for all those new web servers.
In plot terms comprehensible to broadcast executives, we're talking Lost. In its exemplary drive to innovate and meet new audience demands in this barely begun digital revolution, the corporation is in danger of forgetting its core mission: to produce programming that must "inform, educate and entertain". Nowhere did the original charter suggest that Auntie should build empires such as those now envisaged for their own sakes. There is little evidence of consumer dissatisfaction with existing web search sites and media portals such as Google, AOL and Yahoo!, so the BBC would not be filling a particular market gap by starting another. Nor, with plenty of businesses already offering homes for citizens' own creativity - from YouTube to Flickr for video and photographs - is it clear why a publicly funded competitor needs to come along and paddle other innovators' canoes.
This is not to say that all the changes planned lack public-service value. Thompson is right to understand that audiences now want to access their "content" (a technical term for Doctor Who and EastEnders) "in whatever media and on whatever device makes sense for them, whether at home or on the move".
Credit to him too for seeking to make programmes that we have already funded more widely available to watch at our leisure and even "mash up" on our computers. But the vacuity and ill-considered logic of his online expansion plans become clear as you sink somnolently into the "Creative Future" strategy documents. Their painfully unfocused jargon, redolent of the press-release guff churned out by hopeless hi-tech start-ups circa 1999, suggests that in Beebland, too, a desire to impress corporate bosses masks a fundamental lack of clarity about the ultimate goal.
In the documents you will discover Thompson's zeal for "pan platform knowledge building", his hunger to prioritise his shows' "findability" by "cracking metadata labelling", his concern to "rebalance the Knowledge Building portfolio to increase its relevance, responsiveness and modernity, increasing development towards underserved audiences and maximising ideas which have real scale and impact". No, that's not a spoof. Ten "cross-divisional teams" have been working on this stuff for a year.
In the brutal commercial marketplace, the BBC's rivals are justifiably clamouring to limit its online intrusions. Thompson may well reject as self-interested the protests of this newspaper's parent company, which last year spent $580 million (£324 million) to acquire MySpace. He may also brush aside the predictable complaint by Charles Allen, at ITV, that his licence-fee demands rely on "back-of-a-fag-packet figures [which] should come with their own health warning".
Yet they are only two of an unprecedentedly wide alliance now forming to curtail the BBC's "digital empire-building", which includes commercial radio stations, national and local newspapers, internet publishers and most recently the Conservative Opposition, concerned, as David Cameron put it, to prevent the BBC over-extending itself and "squishing [private businesses] like a big foot on an ant".
It's an image that recalls an excellent public-service BBC documentary that David Attenborough once made about ants. Mark Thompson might remember it, too - if he can think back to his pre-internet-mogul days.
(The Times comment page, June 3 2006)
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