Prompt's TechBlog

Speaking at the Edinburgh Television Festival recently, the BBC director general Mark Thompson outlined plans to make all of the broadcaster's programming available for download within the next two years. This could finally herald the beginning of a TV-on-demand revolution that has been brewing for years. Technologically speaking, there's no good reason why people shouldn't be able to download TV shows for viewing at their convenience. However, the conventional broadcasting business model is of course heavily dependent on advertising in key timeslots, and digital downloads threaten to disrupt that situation quite severely.

Completely failing to learn any lessons from what happened in the music industry, most commercial broadcasters have stuck their heads firmly in the sand and refused to countenance any alternative to the status quo. Maybe they thought it would never be feasible for people to download and view TV shows on their computers? Dead wrong - for years there has been a thriving online culture of ripping and sharing popular TV shows. The networks won't deliver TV-on-demand services, so hard-core fans are creating their own.

The publicly funded BBC hasn't got much to lose by straying from the traditional broadcasting model and letting people download its shows. In fact, one could even argue that it has a mandate to provide innovative, convenient mechanisms for the public to access its content at will. Quite how this will be received by the public or whether it will spur commercial networks into action remains to be seen, but it's certainly going to make interesting viewing.