Should the BBC make its content freely available to UK VJ's?

I attended the BBC Innovation Labs event yesterday, very interesting time. Yesterday's Lab (of which there will be 13 this year regionally) gathered about 35 people working around the New Media space, and then Matt Locke, BBC's Head of Innovation, and his team took us through what the BBC is looking for in this area. The eventual aim is to fund a number of feasibility studies into new services.

There was then a workshop run by Frank Boyd of Unexpected Media to drive "Innovation" sessions around service areas that the BBC is interested in using New Media for. There were 2 main phases - a general Phase 1 session on trends in the "New" New Media, and a Phase 2 group workshop session mainly on BBC specific content areas - News, Kids, Drama, Radio One (i.e. all the usual suspects, and seemingly mainly for the "yoof" demographic, as usual).

However, two of these latter session were for Web 2.0 underlying systems - (i) driving User Generated Content, and (ii) Search & Navigation of multimedia content.

Sort of a User Generated Innovation scheme for new BBC services....

In Phase 2, yours truly volunteered for the User Generated Content (UGC) session, and this was where things got interesting.

It became clear to us that UGC is as much about Video-Jockeying (cf music sampling etc) as producing new content from scratch. The meme was then floated - wouldn't it be interesting if all that BBC content was available to be mashed up, mixed and generally played with.

Just imagine if the BBC puts a huge amount of its content online for UK "New Media" enthusiasts and entrepeneurs to play with. Imagine the kick-start of creativity this would unleash. Lots of people are creative, as YouTube has proved - but few have the time or know-how to make original video content.

This would also become a viable way of producing content for newly commissioned programmes (and perhaps is more economic to make, so can compete with (un)reality TV ?)

The BBC could use an adapted creative commons licence to at least allow legal action against people who misuse the content, and could allow people from other countries to pay for the content, thus funding the service.

To me, this looks like one of those truly transforming things that could catapult the UK into a leading position in the emerging Broadband New Media space, which will be one of the major future industries. Everyone, from schools to startups could use this to get projects underway.

We looked also at the BBC's role in this, and thought it could work best as a sort of "Filtering" Aggregator and EPG - using its mission to "educate, inform and entertain" to commission, aggregate, and find/edit/rate content (probably via a variety of social networking, BBC active editing, and automated algorithms) that fitted its ethos - becoming a "trusted YouTube" as it were (also allowing a more lean back audience experience perhaps)

The thorny issue of Rights came up, and I have 3 main thoughts here:

(i) The benefit to the UK economy of making such an asset base open to the full creativity of its citizens would be a truly transformational event, a sort of Digital Media Big Bang
(ii) Moral Right - "We" paid for all that content, so there is some claim that we should get access to it, at least for the purposes of making new content. Certainly from now on how about structuring rights so the public get access to all content (maybe after a windowing period). Extending existing rights beyond the current time limits should be resisted strongly.
(iii) Realekonomik - the Broadband 'Net will allow us to get at the content anyway, so working with, rather than against the flow makes a lot of sense.

For this to work would also need a powerful search capability, but that is for another post. As we have discussed before on here, the key is to have good metadata - though how to get that on a content base the size of the BBC's would be some project.

Anyway, we had to pitch this idea back at the end of the day, and the BBC team smiled benignly but their comments made us (well, me at any rate) realise that this was still a bit radical, even in an innovation workshop - for now anyway. Still, its an interesting idea...the more I turn it over in my head that more transformational I think its impact would be for the UK.

By the way I haven't named my co-conspirators in case they want nothing to do with this - email me if you want to be associated/ lauded/ pilloried, or comment on the blog if you want me hung me out to dry

A short note on the Phase 1 workshop to end off. It was a group session where people had to note major innovative trends emerging in the overall "New" New Media space. All the usual suspects were put up there (MySpace, VoIP, 2nd Life YouTube, Wikipedia, Google Earth, Rights etc etc) but there were 3 ideas that had a new twist to me:

- A sense of loss of "emotional values" in quite a lot of the Web 2.0 technology - I wasn't quite clear what the real issue at the nub of this was, but the sense was that what we say we want and what we really like are different and no tech can sort this out for us.

- Ugliness fosters self creation - MySpace is ugly, so lots of user creativity. Flickr is beautiful, so not so much. This contradicts what writers on for example Vitamin espouse

- You can tell a new comms method has taken hold when it takes its own vernacular, for e.g. SMS defined a new written language structure ( though I would argue some people spoke like that already). This echoes recent discussion on the changes in 2nd Life content, for example here

There was a huge amount of other useful fascinating stuff, I recommend anyone in this space to attend. I also wish I'd had time to meet some of the people afterwards - in fact yet again was the refrain heard "how do we all connect to each other" - see Mike Butcher's echo here