One of the BBC’s founding principles was that it would “bring the best of everything to the greatest number of homes”. It started life as a broadcast monopoly dedicated to improving and educating the population.
In The Master Switch, Tim Wu likens attempts by the forces of closed media – a combination of Apple, Hollywood and AT&T – to provide a seamless, perfect consumer media experience to the BBC’s claim that it provides the “best of everything”.
In the same way that openness is written into the design of the Internet, could it be that closedness is written into the very concept of the BBC?
John Postel wrote “be conservative in what you do. Be liberal in what you accept from others.” into the TCP protocol. A commitment to openness is a part of the specification. John Reith’s view of the BBC’s purpose as being to “educate, inform, entertain” (presumably in that order) is still a big part of how the BBC conceives of itself.
John Naughton wrote a great article in the Guardian a few weeks back about the outcome of the Strategy Review and the cuts to the Online budget. The choice quote was
What the cuts to BBC Online signify is that the internal battle within the corporation between the few who understood that push media represent the past, and the many who think that the Wibbly Wobbly Web (as Terry Wogan used to call Tim Berners-Lee’s invention) is really just the newest way to convey visual stimuli to couch potatoes, is over. And the past has won.