Who is paying for this "free" BBC content after all?

Yesterday back in the UK the shadow chancellor George Osborne fell back on one of the Conservative party's traditional sabre-rattling topics - that of curbing the BBC's website.

At the time of writing, the Conservatives website didn't carry the full text of the speech, only a press release with snippets, so I can only assume there is a bit missing from this sentence:

we should consider establishing a clear set of rules about what areas the BBC should focus on, and which it should be made to set aside for creative people.

Surely he can't be suggesting that all creativity stops at the door of Broadcasting House simply because it isn't a commercial enterprise ;-)

More seriously, one of the new media areas he singles out is that the BBC is hampering small businesses from moving into the download arena. Most of the people quoted in the press coverage so far are actually representatives of very large businesses like Yahoo! and BSkyB. Commercial media players really want to ram this point home - Mike Darcey, commercial and strategy director at BSkyB is quoted in the Sunday Times as saying:

The biggest area for nervousness is the extent to which BBC content will be given out free on the internet. Just when people are getting used to the idea that they should pay for useful internet services, the BBC weighs in with a large free proposition. [My emphasis]

But that is being disingenuous. The content the BBC gives out isn't "free" in the UK in any sense of the word.

It is paid for. By the British public.

It is paid for by the British public when the corporation makes it.

It is paid for by the British public when the corporation commissions the material from an independent producer.

It is paid for by the British public when the corporation spends money archiving it, digitising it and annotating it.

And it is paid for by the British public when the BBC spends money on the bandwidth and technical architecture required for them to be able to download it.

Even more disingenuous though is the idea at the heart of the argument, that consumers are so fickle that if they can get something "free" from the BBC, they won't pay to get something else.

Take the example of last year's BBC Beethoven mp3 downloads, when there were over half a million downloads of "free" music from the BBC. Did the classical music industry lose some sales of Beethoven as a result? Yes. Did it lose half a million sales as a result? Very unlikely - even a best selling individual classical artist like Russell Watson who spent a year at #1 with one of his albums, only claims to have sold over 2 million albums in total in the UK. Did the classical music industry gain some sales as people explored further into the Beethoven catalogue after getting a "free" taster. Almosy undoubtedly. Had the people who downloaded this "free" content already paid for it via their Licence Fee. Absolutely.

What is also for sure is that when the BBC produced a similar classical season devoted to Bach before Christmas, half-a-million people who had paid for the production of that content didn't get to listen to it on mp3 at their leisure or keep it for good. The industry gripes stopped the BBC repeating the downloads experiment.

Or take the example of the Doctor Who TARDISODES.

Are executives at commercial media players really suggesting that because you can download one minute clips of Doctor Who onto your mobile phone and on the web for "free", that instead of actually stimulating demand for getting exclusive clips, this will stop people subscribing to mini-episodes of Lost or Coronation Street or Hollyoaks, or stop these being attractive channels for advertisers. Does BSkyB really think that the BBC having clips of the F.A. Cup Final online diminishes the lucrative value of the new media rights for the Premiership and the Champion's League?

In his speech George Osborne himself says "The BBC receives most of its money from the compulsory licence fee — a tax in all but name". Shouldn't the British public therefore have the benefit of the best possible access to the content that it has already been taxed to produce?