With the UK government’s Digital Britain report due tomorrow, it’s not surprising that today has seen a crop of announcements from media companies touting their digital credentials.
Three claimed “firsts” announced today are Virgin Media’s “unlimited” music downloading partnership with Universal Music; broadcaster Five allowing full-length programmes to be embedded (YouTube-style) in third-party websites; and video streaming site Blinkbox offering pay-per-view Warner Bros movies, from the Dark Knight to Casablanca.
The most contentious part of the Digital Britain consultation process has been the role of government in protecting and promoting digital rights.
The extreme stance – the “three strikes and you’re out” approach to tackling rampant online piracy – is now unlikely to see the light of day, even in its native France. The French high court and the European Commission have both ruled that broadband access is a human right, even if you’re using that right to regularly visit the Pirate Bay.
That will please broadband providers, who don’t want to disconnect their customers. “We violently disagree with the approach taken in France because there is no incentive whatsoever for the customer to change the way they behave,” Neil Berkett, chief executive of Virgin Media told the FT today.
So without that stick available, content owners’ attention is moving towards carrots, as they experiment with new approaches to online distribution.
Virgin’s music service claims a “world first” by offering truly “unlimited” DRM-free music downloads for its broadband customers – though it will be worth checking the fine print (when it’s available later this year) for fair-use terms.
Universal and Virgin hope that their new service will be good enough to incentivise people who are “not buying digital music at the moment” to pay for it – which means it has to be as easy to use as piracy.
Blinkbox’s deal to stream over 1,100 Warner Bros films and TV shows (for a fee) also comes in that spirit – offering legal “instant gratification”. Previously, UK consumers’ only legal options for online movies required a hefty file download, which takes much longer to start than playing a DVD. As the BBC found last year with its iPlayer, moving from a download to streaming model can see usage increase many times over.
As for Five, it is using Brightcove’s media player to syndicate entire programmes such as the Gadget Show and Neighbours (though not hit US imports such as CSI) to other sites, complete with ads.
Five hopes that by putting its content on portals such as Yahoo, AOL or TV.com, or even on individual viewers’ pages, it can double monthly views by the end of the year to over 5m.
This open approach comes at a time when some rival UK broadcasters have only recently got their on-demand video services working on Macs. Others have notoriously failed to profit from millions of viewers watching their clips on YouTube.
“There is a slightly old-school attitude with our bigger competitors that they expect their visitors to come to their site all the time,” says Paul Thornton-Jones, digital controller at Five.
Tomorrow, the Digital Britain project is likely to face criticism for falling short of its initial lofty ambitions.
But Lord Carter, UK communications minister, could justifiably claim some success if he has prompted more “old-school” media companies to experiment with new ideas like these.
