h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Let's hope we manage to get back on WAP soon, then.

As for the political willpower, I wouldn't assume the lack of progress is down to a lack of BBC willpower, more down to the towering amount of paperwork related to anything to do with the Ministry of Culture. I can't think that an email would help, *unless* relaunching h2g2 on WAP turned out to be impossible after all, in which case it'd be a case of lobbying politicians and regulators (which is a different matter altogether!).

Okay, I've read this discussion and I don't get it: what is the particular reason why I shouldn't buy a WAP phone and expect both the BBC and ITN to have their own empoyees or subcontractors working behind the scenes so that I can have WAP news from both of them on my mobile?

It seems to me to be a case of schoolground politics.

"That's not fair, he can't do that!!"

From the Yahoo / ITN example, there was the thing of an external company wanting to pay for the bbc content.
Surely this wouldn't apply in the case of the bbc providing their own content?
I mean, there's nothing out there that is stopping ITN from doing exactly the same thing. Or anyone else for that matter.

Surely, stopping the beeb putting anything out on wap that may be seen as being competative is contrary to the monopolies and mergers stuff? Preventing a business from growth is not a good thing in their eyes as far as I understand their literature. Maybe this is a case of where the larger companies get their own back.

It is after all the same information, from the same database, just displayed in a different medium. wml is merely a scaled down version of html, with a variation on the current scripts that produce the html outputting wml instead. So there's nothing new. But I suppose that the analogy would be if say the bbc were to start outputting their news in newspaper format then the current newspaper companies wouldn't like that and would be up in arms, but hang on, haven't some of hte major newspaper companies gone into the television sector? Did the beeb complain then? Not as far as I'm aware. Same arguement, different way around.

I don't know if this is anything to do with it, but remember that ITN is a profit-driven company that has to make money to exist, and the BBC is funded by the public and doesn't have such constraints. That's where the anti-competitiveness potential comes in.

Say you were a coffee shop, doing pretty nicely. You opened a few shops, and the money was starting to roll in. Nice. Then the government decides to open state-funded coffee shops throughout the country, undercutting your prices by using money from taxes to offset their losses. You lose business to them. Would you be annoyed? Certainly.

If the BBC was a normal company, then this wouldn't be an issue. But they're not, so it is.

At least, I think that's what it's all about. I'm no expert, mind you!

*this has probably been said before but*

I'm wondering if the problem is that Yahoo were going to pay for the rights to convert the content and then use it on its WAP system. As we all know the BBC musn't make any money on its national services. If the BBC employed its own staff to convert the platform to a WML format and then allowed anyone to link to that service free of charge, there might not be as much of a problem. I'm not saying that there wouldn't be any opposition, it's just that it would then opperate in a very similar way to BBC Online. Which ITN doesn't object too.

*crosses fingers and hopes that makes sense*

I would suggest, very respectfully, that nobody in this Conversation, myself included, is involved enough in the details of this case to do anything other than to speculate.

Still, speculate away... but I just thought I'd make that point, in case anyone reading this interprets the various speculations as fact.



(For example, "as we all know the BBC musn't make any money on its national services" is news to me! Don't you mean it can't make a *profit*? It certainly nakes money by selling programmes, merchandise and so on...)

I did mean profit, sorry its been one of those days.

Phew.

I find it disturbing that the flawed business tacticts of a corporation should hamper the growth og The Guide. The deal BBC has made with Yahoo sounds absolutely potty! I myself work as a content developer for wap, web and telephony at the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, and we as well syndicate out content to other portals, but to sell ALL the rights for one medium to ONE company is not sane economics, unless BBC got so much money that it simply doesnt matter what happens to their content.

As someone remarked: Wap is still not a very popular platform, så the BBC probably saw it as a cheap way to have a wap precence without actually haveing to use any resources to develope it, but they should at least have a) kept the right to publish their content in any way they want (or won't) (hence the potty-remark) and b) they certainly should have specified which content should be included (news, sports) and which content shouldn't. To me it sounds like the BBC has been had. And well!

When that is said, I suppose the next step is for the BBC to approach Yahoo and have them provide h2g2 on their wap portal as well. If the deal BBC and Yahoo has made also prohibits futher developement of the BBC wap content on yahoo, then the BBC must be the biggest bunch of amateurs to have ever set foot in the telecoms market!

This is very sad news indeed, and seems to send a very discouraging signal for the future of The Guide on new platforms. It seems to me that the move to BBC was not a very clever move, in hindsight of course.

What about an open source client? either as a stripped down version of the h2g2 webpage (using html and php to parse h2g2 pages, a suggestion) or an actual client that accesses the h2g2 databases (although that sounds unlikely). I think h2g2 belongs more to the community than to bbc, and i dont really see a problem with making h2g2 accesable to atleast palm pilots and visors, which already can browse normal html.

cellphone support is harder, and i dont think it is really that feasable now, or safe. I know i dont want people driving and looking at a guide entry scroll in their cellphone window. I think an open source client is acceptable and possible, with a little information provided from h2g2 staff on a few things.

If giving out that much information (or any) about the guides internals is a problem, could the creation of a "h2g2 server" be a possibility so clients could be easily created by the rest of the world?

I personally think the guide is revolutionaly and amazing, even fun , and i really dont want to see anything hold it back. thanks for listening

"It seems to me that the move to BBC was not a very clever move, in hindsight of course"

Given that the alternative was for h2g2 to disappear into nothingness, leaving no Guide, no WAP service and no future at all, I'd respectfully say that this is not fair. Especially in hindsight - the BBC is intent on developing h2g2 beyond our wildest dreams, but if you want to complain, that's your prerogative.

By the way, the BBC didn't sell all its rights to one company. The dispute was about the fact that a government-funded corporation was able to sell content to third parties, thus being in competition with the established companies who also sell news. It's nothing to do with doing a deal with one publisher only - who said that? - and it's nothing to do with flawed business tactics. It's to do with regulations and the British government, which is different.

Blame the BBC if you like, but it's not fair. In no way at all has the BBC 'been had'. Where did you get this idea?

Surely this still all comes down to the fact that the bbc were going to sell their content? But putting their own content out in a different format is different?

Not really. If the BBC had decided to give their content away to WAP portals instead, then I'm sure that ITN would have been even *more* annoyed - and who could blame them?

It comes down to the old chestnut of how to regulate publicly-funded companies when they compete with privately-owned companies. It's a minefield, but one that obviously has to be sorted out if things are to be fair.

I don't think anyone is to blame. It's not the BBC's fault, as all they wanted to do was to provide their content on a different medium. It's not ITN's fault, as you can totally understand why they feel that this is potentially anti-competitive. And it's not the government's fault, as obviously the situation has to be investigated properly before anyone can take a legal view.

It is, though, a great pity - but it also makes a strange kind of sense. Or am I the only one who sees it this way? (Quite possibly! )

It does make sense. It just seems a little unfair that ITN's complaint has been used to blanket all BBC content, and not just the sections they do compete. Although having said that, most BBC content will compete with someone somewhere. So they will probably have to investigate each individual section of BBC Online seperately to see if there is a potential claim for anti-competitive behavior.

*realises he has to think about this some more*

"not just the sections they do compete"

Ah - but that assumes that the BBC has tried to launch non-news WAP services and has been prevented. Not so (as far as I know, anyway).

If we end up being stymied by the same restrictions, then that's definitely cause for concern, but it's not a blanket ban, it's (hopefully) a specialised ban that won't apply to us.

Watch this space, then.

I like the metaphor about the ice cream shop - but I think that if he had enough people coming in and saying, "Please give us some cheese" if he had the good business sense, he would stock cheese.

I can't understand why the BBC can't produce it's own WAP content. The argument about WAP not being available because of a deal with Yahoo doesn't wash (but, to be honest, I don't know the details).

Is it possible that the BBC has had a 'bung' for not producing WAP content from its own competitors? The only difference is the file format (xml and not html) - nothing else??? ?

My question:

What would happen if ITN started producing WAP content? Would they be stopped too?

No. That wouldn't be a problem for ITN. They would be paying for it with commercial funding, not public money, so it would be like any other company with a WAP platform. Thats perfectly acceptable.

Why is WAP content any less of a public service than TV content?

That last point is quite a good one - were the BBC prevented from selling off their content to the likes of satellite providers? For example, UKGold and all the UKtv network (UKHorizons etc.) all provide programming from the BBC, which we are rightly to assume, sold it off with public money...

How does this differ from selling off WAP content, and that not being fair?