Website: Rapid TV News

The UKs ‘Digital Britain’ plan, the expensive brainchild of Lord Carter, an erstwhile unelected member of Gordon Brown’s back office strategy team and Communications Minister, has died in the ‘end of term’ rush to wrap up parliamentary business.

Out has gone Carter’s highlight idea, the £6 a line tax to fund broadband expansion.

The plan also envisioned a closer co-operation between BBC Worldwide and Channel 4.

Out has gone more power for Ofcom.

Out has gone a scheme to replace regional ITV newscasts with independent news productions.

Still left in the Bill is a clause outlawing online piracy.

Carter left government last summer.

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Now, I know they’re meant to be subtly different, but the logic of opening out the BBC’s iPlayer technology has always seemed to make more sense to me than conceiving new initiatives like Kangaroo and Canvas.

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iPlayer On The Canvas

There is a fundamental difference between Google’s search engine and its YouTube and Reader products.

The former indexes other people’s content, living on other people’s web servers. There’s little doubt about the usefulness of this model, nor about the veracity of how Google makes most of its money exploiting this, even though it is a virtual monopoly that has not been challenged.

But Google now holds vast amounts of other people’s content on its own servers and seems unable to be accountable for this. So, even though YouTube publishes deplorable and illegal videos on Google’s servers, the company denies responsibility for this content.

Equally, the company want to publish (and control) every book ever published, but will take no responsibility for this either – just the profits.

The media world certainly has changed, but allowing Google to operate under different laws, rules and mores to traditional publishers and broadcasters is sheer madness that the FCC, OFCOM and other regulators should address this immediately.

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Excerpted from:
Making Google Accountable

Recently, I rigged up a Dell Studio PC (one of the new breed of tiny, quiet desktops) to my LCD using HDMI and then routed the sound through my sound system. I bought a very slick Toshiba wireless keyboard. I then bookmarked the main video sites and use the keyboard as a remote so that I had a ‘proper’ internet TV experience.

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Can You Spotify It?

The BBC is spending a fortune of our (if you’re British) money covering the motor racing series Formula 1 (which seems a very bad use of tax money if you ask me..) and they’re doing a dreadful job of it. Despite having two Brits in, ahem, pole position in the competition, the coverage all seems very flat. ITV did a much better job despite the intrusive commercial breaks. F1 is an overtly commercial medium and seeing the BBC dedicating so much time to coverage which is plastered in sponsor logos seems very strange (although that, of course, is the nature of any modern sport).

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BBC Fail In Formula 1