BBC television since 1927, DRM video downloads by 2006
The British Broadcasting Corp. is planning a new service for 2006 to let Web users download its television and radio programs up to a week after they have aired. That they're doing this isn't surprising.
More interesting was BBC Director General Mark Thompson's realization that the march of technology is forcing their hand. "I accept", he said, "the premise that if the BBC remains nothing more than a traditional TV and radio broadcaster then we probably won't deserve or get license-fee funding beyond 2016."
Every organization spending the money to produce time sensitive content should immediately make that content avaliable to a secondary market to reach an additional audience or generate additional revenue, using the same content. This is one of our refrains.
The early days of the BBC put today's streaming in perspective. I found more about this history at http://www.televisionheaven.co.uk/, largely based on book from 1950, "Here's Television". Quoting from the book:
There were no television sets on the market in 1932, but a hobbies magazine told you how to make one for yourself. In 1927 a picture had been sent by wireless over a distance of 250 miles in the United States. The news had been received with sarcastic scepticism. Twelve months before that, John Logie Baird had sent images short distances by his own television transmitter, which was a proper eccentric's rig-out of old tin discs, wire and string. After a few months he sent the image of an office boy through the wall into the next room. That was not news at all, but the few who heard about it were mightily impressed...
But it is Gus Chevalier for whom I have a soft spot in my television memories-and those other pioneering artists who shared a fanaticism for television with the handful of BBC staff who were coping with those experimental programmes, below ground level at Broadcasting House. On several nights, I walked round the windy corner of Broadcasting House's prow-like frontage in Portland Place, to watch Eustace Robb put out the 30-line "low definition" television programmes, which were really the first BBC sound and vision broadcasts.
Gus, on top of a day's work at the Windmill, would allow himself to be blotched and streaked with the black and white greasepaint, then used to give sharp definition to the features. He had a white streak down the centre of his nose, black lines under his eyes, and white above. Standing in the flickering light, which threw a spot of light up and down the body, he did his lugubrious "Inventions" act, for the doubtful benefit of a score or so of fanatical enthusiasts, scattered about London, using home-made sets, on which they sometimes saw a hazardous picture six inches high by four inches wide. Nobody knew how many viewers there were.
By 1934 Robb's experimental programmes had to be taken seriously, one way or the other. The BBC, never rash with money, had to decide whether it was backing a winner or a loser, down there among the greasepaint and flickering light in the basement. The studio had been equipped because there was "sufficient technical interest" in television to merit, tests. That kind of interest was certainly abundant. A number of radio apparatus manufacturers had all along been devising methods of television transmission and reception. But the Corporation, a public service, had to decide whether the thing had programme value.
For the rest, read the article at http://www.televisionheaven.co.uk/.
For those of us in the streaming industry, the nineteen ninties were a lot like the 1930s. In 1998 and 1999, I, and my crew of "webcast engineers", worked just as feverishly in the sweaty basements of every major sports arena in the United States. From two different cities every two weeks, we produced the World Wrestling Federation's "BackStage" streaming video shows, broadcast to the Internet audience in real time as the arena action aired on network TV.
During the first show, fans--and advertisers--around the country dialed their modems then crowded up to their computer screens to watch a tiny 160 x 140 pixel window, with the video barely pushing 8 - 15 frames per second. We were faced with the same decision as the BBC. Viewership doubled, quadrupled, exploded to numbers beyond anything seen online. We got the same answer as the BBC---"the thing had programme value."