Simon Perry: Schemes, dreams & trivia

On Friday, Fraser Lovatt covered the launch of BBCi’s one Minute Movies on Digital-Lifestyles.info. They are appealing to anyone to create a film, on any subject; using whatever equipment they have to hand. The only stipulation is that it should be around 1 minute long. The BBC will then make them available to the world.

I think it’s a great idea and is another example of the BBC pushing adventurous ideas. I believe this form of content will be very popular, viewed mostly on PDAs or mobile phones when people are on the move. Time fillers.

Back in heyday of LemonTV, we pitched a cross-platform (streamed, download, TV) version of the concept around the UK broadcasters. We called it 60SecondTV.

The two main styles - factual and fictional - were further broken down into themes. We saw them as a brief, comic introduction to a subject - a kind of Bluffer’s guide, if you like. Each guide was an interactive package of 5 x 1min films. We planned and shot a number of proof-of-concept pieces which were then integrated into rich-media interactive template (while the video played, supplementary information contained in text or graphics were displayed at relevant time points in the video).

Ranging from serious subjects to the flippant, we covered a 60 second guide to classical music, where we broke Charles Hazelwood as a presenter (he’s gone on to become one of the BBC’s faces of classical music). Another example was juggling with a well-known clown from a prominent UK circus.

They were fun to do and we learnt lots. From that experience I know that the task of producing quality, impactful and entertaining piece in only 60 seconds is an achievable challenge, when carefully scripted.

The two examples videos, Parklife and Groucho are unexpected and excellent. It’s good to see such a variety in just two one minute films. I am really looking forward to seeing more of them as they become submitted.

The only area I have a concern with, is one touched on by Fraser’s article, the BBC’s Terms & Conditions for submitting content.

While I appreciate that the BBC is actually putting money into seeing this idea come to life (staff, web database setup, streaming, etc), people putting forward content give the BBC total control over the work, to do what they want with it, on a royalty-free basis. The authors also give up their Moral Rights to the work when it is used by the BBC.

Within the world of independent TV production companies, the BBC (and indeed many of the other broadcasters), are often criticised by their attitude to the ownership of the Rights to the material that they buy. Their normal approach is - let’s keep it simple - we’ll keep them all.

With this widely known and with the BBC planning to collate a lot of viewer/public created content for use as material for their ultra-local stations, i think if individuals are creating content, they should have the option to broadly define usage of the material within a small number of categories.

Rights are going to be strongly pursued by corporations, we have already seen this with the music business, and it will continue with the inevitable rise of DRM protected media. It is only correct that the individual has the same control - and for them to be respected by all.

In the future, Rights in the creation of works will need to be down to an individual basis. It has already happened in the film industry.

I would have thought that it would be preferable to enable contributors to select a from a model like the Creative Commons licences, that fitted their needs. They are very clear, easy to understand, and limited to a manageable number. Implementing it would be attainable as they are already computer readable.

In a world where the delivery of media will be accountable down to the level of an individual viewing - there is an opportinuty for the BBC to set a precident. Along with the media revolution that is occurring within the hothouse that currently is the BBC, I would suggest that there needs to be an equal revolution concerning the ownership of the Rights of the material.

BTW - With all of this talk about Creative Commons, I felt it would be somewhat hypocritical to still have this blog copyrighted, so I’ve finally got around to changing my templates to include my CC licence. Many have already done so, but if you haven’t yet, I encourage you to do so.