“MyBBCPlayer” To be Launched Next year

thomsonbbc1.jpgAlso at the Edinburgh International Television Festival, BBC Director General Mark Thompson revealed some more plans about BBC’s ambitious online TV program archives…He announced plans for the MyBBCPlayer – which will allow viewers to legally download seven days of programmes…the service is formally supposed to launch next year, only for UK users. Test have been going on for some time now.

Among the plans:

– A simulcast of BBC One or BBC Two is planned.

– In a departure from past corporation policy, the player would also enable viewers to buy items via the BBC site. “The idea that in the age of the iPod that the public would not welcome the opportunity to buy a piece of music they heard on the site seems to me to be ridiculous,” he said.

Reuters: The idea that “there needs to be a vast cordon sanitaire” between public service and commercial transactions “flies in the face of the way the public actually use the media now,” he said.

– Thompson said that when and if the BBC links to online music stores, “the choice of commercial providers (would be) fair and open.”

Scotsman: Thompson compared the move to the corporation’s decision to expand from radio to television in 1936. He said: “A broadly based, multimedia, licence based funded BBC with a brand that everyone knows is great, relevant content which everyone can use will make sense.”

Manchester Evening News: “Everything we know about the online world suggests that it’s the big brands the eBays, the Amazons, the Microsofts that punch through…And the BBC is one of the big brands. In content terms one of the biggest on-line brands in the world and by far the biggest British one.”

Related: BBC’s Renewed Push Online And On Mobile

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