Online business Toolkit
Story: BBC joins forces with YouTube
Quality, not Quantity will be the key
The advantage of the agreement is that it opens up another content consumption stream for UK consumers wanting to watch BBC programming online. However, the main barrier to it becoming popular is the very stream that it has chosen. Google and YouTube have historically only shown videos in Flash format, which is renowned for for its low bit rate and being difficult to watch when expanded to full screen.
With the traditional licence fee model, the BBC has an obligation to make its content available to the UK public, whether through traditional means or online. However, those outside of the UK – who haven’t paid for the privilege – can still easily access the content, when it is available online; perhaps not a disaster when it is an episode of Newsnight, but of huge importance when it is a big Hollywood movie that the BBC has rights to show in the UK alone.
There is no doubt it is a burgeoning market, with online video consumer tastes rapidly changing from wanting quick and humourous 20 seconds videos, to wanting the type of content that they would sit down and watch for 30 minutes or more.
Today, Google and YouTube use Flash technology in a way that is appropriate for short, user-generated clips where quality is not the most pressing priority; but now, with content coming from studios such as the BBC, that method of delivering content is likely to fall short of consumer satisfaction levels as they are used to watching mainstream content in higher quality.
The type of quality programming that the BBC is renowned for lends itself to being viewed via high quality and on multiple devices, in potentially multiple locations. This is the use model that consumers are familiar with for this kind of content and we expect them to have similar expectations for the consumption of this kind of quality content delivered online.
Mark Lawson, DivX, Inc.
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