BBC Strikes Up A Deal With Youtube

Today the BBC announced that they inked a deal with Youtube to feature clips of BBC content.

The Agreement is non exclusive and set to run for several years. Here are the specifics:

One of the BBC’s two entertainment channels will be a “public service” proposition, featuring no advertising.

It will show clips like trailers and short features that add value - for example, video diaries of David Tennant showing viewers around the set of Dr Who or BBC correspondent Clive Myrie explaining how difficult it is to report from the streets of Baghdad.

The channel’s main purpose is to popularise current programming and drive traffic back to the BBC’s own website, and point the audience to the BBC’s pages, where they can watch or download programmes in full, once the BBC Trust approves the corporation’s catch-up television proposal, called iPlayer.

BBC Worldwide: The second entertainment channel will feature self-contained clips - about three to six minutes long - mining popular programmes in the BBC’s archive. Excerpts from Top Gear, The Mighty Boosh and nature programmes presented by David Attenborough are top candidates for this channel.

This YouTube page will carry advertising such as banner adverts, and possibly pre-roll adverts (shown as part of the video clip) as well. Controversially, the BBC Worldwide page - adverts and all - can be seen in the UK.

BBC Worldwide insists that this is not a new departure, as BBC magazines like Top Gear and channels like BBC World and UK Living (which shows mainly BBC content) already do carry advertising.

BBC News: The news channel, which will be launched later this year, will show about 30 news clips per day. It will be advertising funded like a similar deal with Yahoo USA. BBC News is also offered to non-UK subscribers of Real Networks.

Because of the advertising, these clips can be seen outside the UK only. Any UK users clicking on a link to one of the news clips on YouTube will get a message that they have no access to this clip.

The General Manager of the BBC called the rev share deal “ground-breaking partnership” that would “engage new audiences in the UK and abroad”.

Many other large media companies including Fox and CBS already have similiar agreements with Youtube, which is owned by Google.

Google knows no boundaries as if comes to making profits and I imagine more companies will be making the move to make more revenue from their own content, or building their own networks like Viacom to support it.

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