Public media: get it, copy it and share it

At the iMMovator Crossmedia Cafe Monique de Haas (see photograph) presented some ideas about a social networking on behalf of the Dutch public broadcast (NPO), a holding of the non-profit broadcast companies. The idea are presently fully crystallised yet, but they under development. The basic idea of the project is that content should be able to be retrieved, copied and shared. The Dutch public broadcast hopes to launch their project before coming December.

The public broadcast so far has been a closed system. The audience was not involved. But now it looks like the public broadcast is opening up and posing the question, what people want to do with the content provided by the public broadcast. People want to put this information in a new context. For the public broadcast this will mean that tit will have to open up so that people can fetch the content, copy it and share it through their blogs, for example.

A big problem is of course how the public broadcast will control this process. So far the public broadcast has been very tight about copying. So far they have not undertaken actions against illegal copying yet. But when I asked the national broadcast archive for the video report of the launch of the first commercial online service in the Netherlands, I was told that if I would get permission, it would cost me 600 euro; for that money I could show the 3 minutes video report on blog. But it all depended on the permission from the NPO Journaal department! (Mind you, I have paid for the public broadcast through special levies and taxes all the time that I lived in the Netherlands). Of course the Dutch public broadcast has an example in the BBC Creative Archive, where they are carefully experimenting with creative commons in copying for sites and blogs; of course this project concerns the broadcast’s archive and not the daily programs.

I liked the idea that the Slovenian broadcast company worked out so far. They have launched Strip mine, a site where they have cut up their videos in small parts (micro-chunking), present the programs with a photograph, with the text of the program and with a link to the video. In the text they automatically apply links to the Wikipedia. But best of all, the company sends a message to bloggers, that there is content which fits their personal preferences. In this way the bloggers get authentic content and can quote precisely to argue their case.

Blog Posting Number: 911

Tags: broadcast, micro-chunking, broadcast archive, creative commons