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SPEKTAKULÄRER DEAL
BBC sendet via YouTube

Es ist ein Megadeal der Internet-TV-Branche. Überraschend haben Google, YouTube und die BBC heute eine weit gefasste Kooperation bekannt gegeben. Ausgewählte BBC-Programme sind ab sofort über YouTube erhältlich.

Ich hoffe inständig, daß bei den so online verfügbaren TV-Häppchen auch Jeremy Clarksons “Top Gear” sein wird. Er selbst sah mit YouTube bereits den Weltuntergang nahen:

The end is nigh, see it on YouTube
[...] Strangely, however, my biggest fear for the future of the planet and the wellbeing of our children is YouTube.
At present it is full, mostly, of young men falling off their bicycles and catching fire. But in addition to this you can log on if you wish to see next week’s episode of 24. This means the producers of 24 have gone to all the trouble of making a show, and paying the actors, and getting all those phones to go “beep beep eeoooh” and then finding that no television company in the world is all that bothered about screening it, because everyone’s seen it already on the web. Naturally the company that makes 24 — and I suppose I should point out that it’s Fox, which is part of News Corporation, the parent company of this newspaper — has started proceedings against YouTube. Fine, you might think. YouTube will be forced to treat the copyright laws with a bit more respect and that will be that. Except it won’t. Because the internet’s like mercury, so as soon as it becomes impossible to post copyrighted material on YouTube, some other computer nerd in Bangladesh will, for an outlay of 35p, start a new video-sharing site. And you’ll be able to post it there. This morning there are 921 Jeremy Clarkson clips on YouTube, for which, obviously, I receive not a penny. Of course I could sue them — and now they’re owned by Google I think I might — but then the 921 clips would simply appear on the new sharing site based in Bangladesh. And what’s the point of suing someone whose only assets are a laptop and a loincloth? The upshot is that films, television shows, magazines, newspapers, songs, anything published or recorded, can be put on the internet. And the person who published it or recorded it doesn’t get any money. So what’s the point of publishing or recording anything? Obviously, if Jonathon Porritt were to write a book, it would be jolly funny to buy the first copy and put it all online, so he ended up with a royalty cheque for 50p. But it’s not so funny if you are Jonathon Porritt. [...]

Ich liebe Jeremy Clarkson, aber ich teile seine Befürchtungen nicht. Da die BBC ein öffentlich-rechtlicher Sender ist, werden ihre Angestellten und Zulieferer gewiss niemals hungern müssen. Und Clarkson hat Glück, in diesen erlauchten Kreis aufgenommen worden zu sein. Die falsche politische Einstellung kann einem hier sehr im Wege stehen:

The pain of being a Tory at the Beeb
[...] However, after 25 years as a BBC reporter I concluded that I could not trust it. Auntie has moved away from its nonpartisan ideals to championing progressive causes. And that is a distorting prism through which to see the world.
Back to pavement level. As you stand there outside the Tube at White City, BBC people course past you. They swing into work with their interesting bags and clothes, no two alike. In this respect, at least, the BBC does fulfil its royal charter obligation to balance: no style goes unrepresented. But their colourful plumage camouflages a more insidious conformity. For with membership of the tribe comes adherence to a set of well defined political beliefs, distinctly inclined to the left.
These convictions are not made explicit to the outsider; the line for public consumption is that the BBC has no line. But this is moonshine; it takes very strong editorial positions which are consistent and clear. There is no central diktat, for instance, insisting that all employees believe that George Bush is an idiot and that the American religious right threatens world peace. But you would find few BBC people who would dissent from such views.
Why should this be so? First, the majority of BBC employees share similar backgrounds: they are middle-class arts graduates of liberal outlook. Second, the internal political culture within the corporation’s newsrooms is well defined and subtly coercive. [...]

Trotzdem freue ich mich darauf, BBC-Programme online sehen zu dürfen - weil eben auch sehr viel sehr gutes dabei ist.