Video, Education, and Open Content - Peter Gerhardt
Notes from Peter Gerhardt’s (BBC Creative Archive) talk at CCNMTL’s Video, Education, and Open Content conference:
They determined a portion of the BBC archive to release for re-use by the people who pay for the BBC in the UK. But before setting out on the project they had to prove that it would have an impact in the market. They ran the project for about 18 months. They had about 100,000 registered users. It was completely free for them to do so. The people using the site were educational folks and learners, people interested in local history and natural history. It was all from the factual and news areas. They were more restricted when it came to the entertainment.
As a pilot, it was a reasonable success. It provided a lot of data that proved there was a strong public appetite to engage with the BBC archives.
The BBC is a heavily regulated institution. The new BBC trust is the regulator appointed by the government. The function of the trust is to simply approve what the BBC does. The trust has been in operation for six months and its only had time to approve one new idea.
The debate is about the old and the new. It’s about allowing people to interact with the media that people grew up with.
