My reaction to this can only be: “holy, bloody, cow!”
Greg Dyke, director general of the BBC, has announced plans to give the public full access to all the corporation’s programme archives.
Mr Dyke said on Sunday that everyone would in future be able to download BBC radio and TV programmes from the internet.
The service, the BBC Creative Archive, would be free and available to everyone, as long as they were not intending to use the material for commercial purposes, Mr Dyke added.
“The BBC probably has the best television library in the world,” said Mr Dyke, who was speaking at the Edinburgh TV Festival.
“Up until now this huge resource has remained locked up, inaccessible to the public because there hasn’t been an effective mechanism for distribution.
“But the digital revolution and broadband are changing all that.
Click here for the full story (link courtesy of Jordan Cooper)
I can hardly fathom this. Every single television program in the BBC archives? Every existing minute of Doctor Who? Or possibly even Quatermass and the Pit? The BBC has certainly set the bar in making the Internet into a great, free library, and like Jordan, I hope that other television stations step up. The CBC would do well to set up a similar archive, as would the National Film Board of Canada. Heck, if CNN were to do the same, think of what would become available to the fingertips of tomorrow’s schoolchildren!
The new cover and sample articles from the latest issue of Alternatives Journal is up at the website. Click on over and see what I mean about an interesting cover to illustrate Smart Growth.
In Much Sadder News…
Our prayers are with the people in Kelowna tonight as they face down a brutal firestorm. Jim Elve has a good collection of links on the subject.
In other sad news, today was the day that the number of American soldiers killed after George W. Bush declared victory in Iraq equals the number of American soldiers killed before it. At the current rate of death, Iraq continues to tick over into a long drawn-out quagmire that the neo-conservatives of Washington said wouldn’t happen.
And in even worse news, the peace in Kurdistan took a bit of a hit, yesterday, as Turkomen and Kurds clashed over land in Kirkuk. Turkey has agreed to send in 10,000 troops to patrol the “Sunni Triangle” extending west and north of Bagdhad. It’s still too early to tell if my dire predictions for Kurdistan will come true after all, but it’s looking worse than it was on May 1st, when the United States supposedly won this thing.
One of the commentators on Chris Albritton’s Back to Iraq blog nailed the situation dead on, in my opinion:
“George W. Bush pushed for this war, said that we didn’t need any help from anyone else, attempted to undermine the legitimacy of the United Nations + and never had a plan on what to do to help these people come out of the war.
Is it any wonder that things are the mess that they are? And the fault lies plainly at George Bush’s door.