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The BBC announced about a month ago that they were looking to make all or a considerable amount of their archives available online—for free. While much of the traditional media infrastucture is rebelling against net technologies, the Beeb is openly embracing it. Further evidence that they get it—they are looking to use exiasting or create a new P2P application to help distribute the archives. BBC’s new media director Ashley Highfield announced at IBC Amsterdam this past weekend that BBC was developing a new platform neutral program to play downloaded or streamed programs, and be able to record them like a PVR. BBC would use P2P networks to provide a cost effective method of providing content to users.
“A fully flexible, platform-neutral, super EPG is in development that will allow TV content to be recorded TiVo-style. It’ll enable shows being broadcast now to be downloaded or streamed, and most significantly TV shows that went out recently to be recalled from our archive and downloaded.
“To save on the huge bandwidth load this will place on us, we’re exploring legitimate P2P models to get users to share our content on our behalf transparently.”
—Ashley Highfield