These deals reinforce something I tried to make clear in an earlier post about the company’s plans: namely, if you don’t like television then you’re probably not going to be very happy with the future of Twitter. The deal with BBC America — which is owned by BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the agency, and carries such popular shows as Doctor Who and Top Gear in the U.S. — will presumably see Twitter run clips from those shows inside its users’ streams, in much the same way it did with ESPN during March Madness.

.@Twitter and @BBCAmerica, home of #DoctorWho & #TopGear, ink deal to offer 1st in-Tweet branded video synced to entertainment TV series—
BBC AMERICA (@BBCAMERICA) April 18, 2013

TV shows inside your Twitter stream

There have been other such one-off deals — as well as arrangements like the one with the Weather Channel, which will bring weather clips into Twitter’s expanded tweets — but the BBC America partnership seems to be the first one that involves an entire channel and potentially all of their shows, and it could easily be the prototype for further such deals. But will users react positively or negatively to all of this real-time video showing up in their Twitter streams?

Meanwhile, Twitter is also launching a somewhat different project with the Comedy Central channel that illustrates just how much the company wants to bring video as an experience inside the stream: the network is launching what it calls a five-day “comedy festival,” but all of the content will appear within Twitter, and most of it will be either created or distributed via Twitter’s recent video acquisition, Vine — which is designed for video clips of six seconds or less.

According to a report in the New York Times about the arrangement, a number of comedians — including legends like Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner — will be posting video snippets of comedy routines as well as jokes using the hashtag #ComedyFest. On Tuesday, comedian Steve Agee will reportedly host a “Vine Dining” party as part of the festival, in which he and others will tell stories in six-second video clips that will be hosted and distributed by the Twitter network.

Video plus brands equals ad dollars

As my colleague Eliza Kern noted in her post last week about the rumors of deals with Viacom and NBC, these moves are just part of Twitter’s ongoing plans to not only host TV and video content on the network, but to monetize it (or help its creators monetize it) as well. In addition to Vine, one of the recent acquisitions that could help Twitter do that is Bluefin Labs, which specializes in tracking the real-time data about who is watching what show.

That kind of information — along with the data from Twitter’s partnership with Nielsen, announced last year — would in turn help Twitter appeal to advertisers who are looking for as much targeting information as they can get. And that appeal could be paying off already: according to a report from the Financial Times on Monday, Twitter has signed a major multi-year deal worth “hundreds of millions of dollars” with Starcom MediaVest Group, a large ad-buying firm that represents clients like Walmart and Coca-Cola.

Moves like these — and the launch of Twitter Music last week — reinforce just how much the company has evolved away from its original nature as a short-messaging service that gave you only 140 characters or less, and could be consumed quickly. Now, it is becoming a lot more like a broadcast network, or at least a willing handmaiden for broadcast networks, as CEO Dick Costolo predicted in a speech last year. But is that what users really want from Twitter?

This post was updated on April 24 to note that BBC America is a unit of BBC Worldwide and not a joint venture with Discovery Channel as was originally stated.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / Dmitris K and Eva Blue

The initiative is somewhat similar to the BBC’s “A History of the World in 100 Objects,” a very popular 2010 project that explored 100 objects in the British Museum in 15-minute episodes.

“82nd & Fifth is a project that speaks directly to my interest in using the Met’s collection to link historical art and culture to the real world,” Met CEO and director Thomas Campbell said in a statement. “In a sea of constant information, these two-minute, authoritative commentaries are a welcome way to get powerful and compelling content in quick doses.” The objects can be sorted on a timeline or viewed by location in Google Earth.

Each episode features a curator talking over a series of photographs, and then an interactive feature that lets viewers explore the work of art up close (rotating Antonio Rossellino’s “Madonna and Child with Angels,” for instance, or clicking through blueprints for Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Little House Living Room”).

The site is built using responsive design so that it works across devices, and there are some very basic features for sharing the episodes on social media. The Met notes this is its third major online initiative: “The Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, launched in 2000, continues to evolve and expand, and receives more than one million visits per month. Connections (2011) offers personal perspectives on works of art from the collection by 100 Met staff members.”

You only have to look around you and see that the power of a lie is stronger than ever — in politics, in propaganda or anywhere else. And forget the shoes: some days it seems as if the truth hasn’t even found its pants on by the time a lie is racking up the air miles.

Just take the case of Lord McAlpine, once one of the most powerful politicians in Britain, who was taken by surprise when the internet launched a virulent — and completely misguided — campaign to label him a child rapist.

Just in case you haven’t been watching this mess exploding across the British media over the last few weeks, let me recap briefly. At the start of November, the BBC’s Newsnight program — already under fire for not running a story about allegations of pedophilia against a now-deceased BBC presenter — decided to prove its mettle by running a report claiming that a senior politician from the 1980s was, in fact, a child abuser.

While the report did not name the individual, speculation (inevitably) spilled out onto the net and the culprit hinted at in the report was widely identified: McAlpine, the man who helped finance Margaret Thatcher’s decade in power. Except it turned out the BBC had the wrong man, in a genuine case of mistaken identity that was blown up to mammoth, excruciating proportions by a series of basic journalistic failures.

Ouch.

Heads rolled: big ones. The BBC’s new boss George Entwistle (pictured) resigned, sending the corporation even deeper into turmoil and leaving some — including our own Mathew Ingram — to even question the validity of its role as a state-sanctioned broadcaster at all.

It is, as they say around these parts, a right old mess.

But how do you fix it? How can you make the truth more powerful than a falsehood?

McAlpine and his lawyers have decided to take recourse to the law and hold the internet accountable, by chasing “a very long list” of people who mentioned McAlpine’s name on Twitter and elsewhere. Here’s what they said:

“We know who you are; we know exactly the extent what you have done and it’s easier to come forward and apologise and arrange to settle us because this is cheaper’.”

I can’t fault McAlpine for wanting to recover his reputation. Who wouldn’t? But however many legal actions he launches, it is not the courts — or the threat of the courts — that will correct the wrong done against him. McAlpine — a millionaire who lives in Italy — doesn’t need the money. And the apologies don’t carry much weight really, since they come from people he has not met and never carry as far or as loud as accusations.

Not exactly free speech

British courts have found one, drastic way to try and curtail social media abuses. Over the last few months, we’ve seen a rash of court cases and even imprisonment resulting from offensive messages on social media: for racist comments about a sick sportsman, joking about a missing 5-year-old, saying soldiers should ‘go to hell’.

McAlpine’s fake accusers are unlikely to see a prison cell, since these would be civil actions — though you can never be sure the UK’s legislators won’t try and find a way to make it so: they wanted to shut down Facebook and Twitter after last year’s summer riots, after all, despite no evidence that they were used to incite violence.

In fact, however, the truth is that the fix has already been identified and deployed, because the lie has become news in and of its own right. The fact that McAlpine was wrongly implicated has, in fact, become a much bigger deal than the original report ever was. But it is only successful because of the very specific context (that it happened within the BBC, which everyone has an opinion about) and the severity of the response (that it led to the Beeb’s newly-installed boss performing a sudden act of seppuku).

The information network that so readily slandered him has stepped in to take action action because the fact the slander was wrong became more interesting. What the network taketh away, the network giveth, so to speak.

Unfortunately, while this may work for Lord McAlpine, but it won’t work for everyone. The trouble is that information is not self-correcting unless the truth is more interesting than the untruth. There are very few times that happens, and usually it’s because the lie is so big and dangerous that the blowback is violent.

The fact is, there aren’t many lessons in this mess. Perhaps if you want your indiscretions to get corrected, make them drastic enough that they can’t be ignored. Or, if you want a big lie to get skewered, make sure an international broadcaster is there to take the blame.

In the end, though, these are pretty tough conditions to replicate. And until you manage to do that, Mark Twain looks more and more right as each day passes.

To put things in perspective, the British Broadcasting Corp. isn’t just a government-financed news outlet. It also happens to be one of the largest broadcasters and news agencies in the world, with almost 25,000 employees, and an annual budget — financed primarily by the “TV tax” that the British government levies on every television set owning household in the country — of more than $5 billion. Do we really need that kind of state-financed news entity in an age when journalism is everywhere? Couldn’t that amount of money be used in better ways, either to fund independent news entities or for some other purpose?

Dear everybody hating on the BBC. I have three words for you. American cable TV. Choose carefully :)

—
umair haque (@umairh) November 10, 2012

Does the BBC need to be restructured or dismantled?

The first bombshell to hit what Brits call “The Beeb” came when Jimmy Savile, host of a long-running entertainment show, was accused of having engaged in sexual abuse of children over a span of several decades. The state broadcaster’s show Newsnight had a piece prepared that detailed these allegations, but someone at the organization spiked the story. The director-general of the agency, Mark Thompson — who just became the new CEO of the New York Times Co. — has said he had no knowledge of the incident, but the decision has sparked a loss of confidence in the BBC’s ability to monitor itself.

Just weeks after this crisis, the broadcaster aired a Newsnight documentary about a separate case of sexual-abuse allegations, and identified a prominent MP Conservative, Lord McAlpine, as the perpetrator. Unfortunately for the BBC and everyone involved in the program, the victim later said that his attacker was not Lord McAlpine — and it turned out that the broadcaster had not actually confirmed that McAlpine was involved, nor had it approached the MP about the allegations. The BBC’s new director-general has stepped down after just 2 months in the job, and the agency’s director of news and the deputy director for news have also stepped aside. (Update: As a number of readers have pointed out, the program didn’t name Lord McAlpine but referred to a senior Conservative from the Thatcher era. At least one of the journalists who worked on the documentary identified the subject as McAlpine, however, and that information then spread through Twitter).

Much of the response to these events has focused on how the BBC needs to be restructured in some way: how the head of the news or editorial division should be separate from the head of the business side or the director-general’s office, etc. Former Guardian digital editor Emily Bell, now at Columbia University running the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, does a good job of retracing the steps that may have led to the BBC’s recent journalistic failures. And almost everyone notes that the Beeb is still trusted and in some cases even revered by the British people — but there are those who suggest otherwise:

When I first joined, the BBC was a community of passionate programme makers. Now a labyrinthine, largely unaccountable, bureaucracy. Tragic

—
Martin Hughes-Games (@MartinHGames) November 12, 2012

Do we need a single state-funded source of journalism?

But while the BBC’s decisions in both of these cases deserve all the investigation they are getting both from within the agency and from outside it, it’s worth asking whether the British government — and by extension the British populace — need to be financing a $5-billion organization to produce journalism. And if they do, what should that entity’s purpose be? A similar question could be asked in Australia and Canada, both of which have their own national versions of the BBC (the U.S. also helps subsidize National Public Radio and other public entities, although the majority of their revenue comes from donations).

As even a former chairman of the British broadcaster has pointed out, one of the biggest criticisms that can be made of a state-funded news outlet like the BBC is that it is being paid to compete with private broadcasters and news companies, many of which can barely afford to continue doing business at all, let alone match the vast revenue and resources of the Beeb. Along with its counterparts in Australia and Canada, the BBC has become a powerful force in online news, ranking just below outlets like the New York Times and CNN when it comes to overall audience.

Supporters argue that there is a place for an (allegedly) impartial source of journalism, one that will undertake the kinds of investigative projects that other outlets do not — and that would be a great rationale for the existence of a state-funded news entity, if that’s all the BBC and its counterparts did. But the reality is that they also produce a vast quantity of regular news and entertainment as well. Is that really something that residents of Britain need to subsidize with their taxes?

If governments want to fund the creation of news and journalism, maybe they would be better off finding some way to do that by financing independent entities, the way the Knight Foundation and other non-profit trusts do, instead of propping up anachronistic players like the BBC.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users zawtowers and R/DV/RS

Sullivan, the former editor of the Buffalo News who took over as public editor of the NYT in September, describes in her post how Thompson — who ran the BBC for eight years — has become embroiled in an investigation into child molestation and sexual assault allegations against a former BBC presenter. The BBC apparently had an investigative report underway as part of its Newsnight program that would have looked at these allegations, but it was later shelved. Thompson has said that he had no knowledge of the investigation, or at least that he was “never formally notified.”

This wasn’t enough for the NYT’s public editor, however. In addition to recommending in the headline of her post that the paper “must aggressively cover Mark Thompson’s role in BBC’s troubles,” Sullivan questions whether his defence is believable or not:

“How likely is it that he knew nothing? A director general of a giant media company is something like a newspaper’s publisher. Would a publisher be very likely to know if an investigation of one of its own people on sexual abuse charges had been killed?”

Sullivan is right to raise the questions she does

Although the public editor doesn’t come to her own conclusion on that question — saying it can be complicated by the so-called “Chinese wall” between editorial and the business side of a news entity — she seems to suggest that he likely would have in this case, because of the severity of the case. And she goes on to say that it’s worth asking whether the New York Times even wants the former BBC executive to become its new CEO, given the questions raised about his involvement:

“How likely is it that the Times Company will continue with its plan to bring Mr. Thompson on as chief executive? His integrity and decision-making are bound to affect The Times and its journalism — profoundly. It’s worth considering now whether he is the right person for the job, given this turn of events.”

Sullivan also recommends that the newspaper should start by “publishing an in-depth interview with Mr. Thompson exploring what exactly he knew,” and that this interview should also look into what the effects of the scandal might be on his job and duties at the New York Times. As the public editor notes in her post, this is exactly the kind of investigation the BBC didn’t do into its own behavior, and the result is what appears to be a major scandal for the broadcaster.

I wrote recently about the public editor position, and suggested that the New York Times should have more than just one — in effect, that all of its senior editors should function as “public editors,” by interacting with readers through the comments and social media about the stories that they are involved in, defending their choices and so on, instead of relying on Sullivan to do so.

This was taken by some as a sign that I disapprove of the idea of having a position like Sullivan’s, but that’s not really the case. I think there is a purpose to the job, and a benefit to having a single person whose entire job consists of holding the paper’s feet to the fire — and the former Buffalo News editor seems to be doing a bang-up job so far. She deserves kudos for taking her job seriously, and the NYT would be wise to pay attention to her recommendations.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock/Allies Interactive Services and Flickr user Jeremy King

In a new study, two University of Arizona researchers use Twitter’s emergence as a “serious newswire” to compare the reach and longevity of news stories tweeted by organizations like Reuters, NPR and the Washington Post. Over a three-week period last winter, the researchers looked at tweets containing story links and found that stories from the BBC and the New York Times were the most widely retweeted.

The study’s authors, Sudha Ram and Devi Bhattachary, also looked at metrics like articles’ half-life to determine the popularity and longevity of a news story. They found that articles from BBC, Mashable and the NYT had the longest life span, while the BBC, Mashable and Wired were most likely to publish popular articles — stories on Twitter that exceeded the average article half-life of 5.5 hours (“half-life” is based on a bitly definition that says it’s the amount of time at which a link receives half of the clicks it will ever receive after it’s reached its peak).

The study also looked at rates of engagement — how often a Twitter user is likely to tweet a given news source. On this front, financial publications like the FT and Forbes scored lowest while the NYT, NPR and the BBC scored highest.

The BBC’s prominence can be explained in large part by the fact that is has three major Twitter spigots that frequently retweet each other: “bbcnews,” “bbcbreaking” and “bbcworld.” This means that the BBC has far more of what the study calls “Maximum Level” retweets — Level I is an initial retweet, Level II is a retweet of Level I and so on.

The study, which draws on methods used for epidemics and network analysis, also uses intriguing graphics to display news organizations’ influence. This picture, for example, shows how the NYT and the Washington Post stories produce similar network effects, but the NYT stories are retweeted by more people in isolation:

So what to make of all this? One obvious observation is that the pool of data tied to Twitter gives news agencies unprecedented tools to measure their influence and shape strategy. But, as the study notes, one size may not fit all:

This leads to the question of what constitutes successful news diffusion on Twitter. Bursts of 1st level tweets within the first hour of diffusion (corresponding to instant reach to a large audience) or a high network diameter indicating multiple levels of exchange of news over a period of time (longer lifespan)? This depends on the objective of the news media source.

Another takeaway is that these are still early days for data and news analysis. While the Twitter study is intriguing, it is presented (appropriately) in the language of science — “edge/node ratios,” “ego network details” and so on. This means it may take time for the study’s implications to be translated into everyday guidance for publishers and editors.

So is Mark Thompson, a man who has spent his entire career running a government-funded broadcaster, the right person for the job? Obviously the New York Times board — including controlling shareholder Arthur Sulzberger Jr. — believes that he is. But as my colleague Robert Andrews notes in a profile of Thompson, whatever digital vision or expertise in mobile the British public broadcaster has didn’t really come from its director-general, and he was seen by many primarily as a “custodian and curator.” As the New York Times tries to adapt to a fundamental shift in the way media works, is that really the kind of leader it needs?

Print revenue is collapsing, and digital is not enough

The challenges that the New York Times is facing are well-known, and they are a microcosm of the unprecedented pressures that the entire newspaper industry — if not the entire traditional media industry — is struggling with. Print-advertising revenue, which has been the driving force behind the newspaper business for half a century, has been in virtual free fall for the past several years, and if anything the decline is picking up speed. Being a well-known and global brand like the NYT no doubt helps, but it is not enough: In its most recent financial statement, the paper said print-ad revenue at the company dropped by 7 percent.

Even more disturbing than that, the paper’s online ad revenue — which theoretically should be one of the bright spots amid the gloom — declined as well. Advertisers are increasingly looking for targeted ad programs that reach specific groups, and the reality is that social networks such as Facebook and Twitter and web-native publishers are seen as better places to achieve that.

On the bright side, the NYT‘s paywall program is generating substantial amounts of revenue. Exactly how much isn’t clear, because the paper doesn’t break out things like discounts and giveaways. What we know is that there are more than 500,000 subscribers who pay for the paper’s digital product in one form or another, and it is estimated to be making about $100 million. As we noted recently, this has pushed the NYT over the threshold to where it is now pulling in more revenue from subscriptions than it does from advertising, a historic shift the Financial Times is also close to achieving.

Even though the paywall is being hailed as a success, however — and has inspired hundreds of other newspapers throughout the United States to implement their own versions of the subscription model — the revenue it is generating is still not enough to make up for the decline in the paper’s print advertising. In other words, the paywall is bringing in new blood, but the exsanguination of the New York Times continues through other orifices. For at least a few years, About.com (which the paper acquired in 2005 for $410 million) helped make up for that flow, but it has been hammered by Google and the NYT is now looking to unload it.

Is Mark Thompson going to reinvent the Times?

So what does Mark Thompson bring to this picture? Obviously he is used to running a giant media entity with global aspirations, and from the sounds of it the New York Times is interested in his expertise in the field of video — one of the areas where the paper is hoping it can develop new offerings and hopefully bring in new forms of revenue (the Wall Street Journal has been making similar moves). But at the same time, a government-funded entity with a guaranteed revenue stream is a very different animal from a publicly traded newspaper whose core business is being eroded at an almost unprecedented rate.

I can’t wait for us to start imposing NYT license fees on every American household.

—
Jacob Harris (@harrisj) August 14, 2012

Observers have made jokes about how answering to the Sulzberger family will be very similar to answering to the British government, and some have noted that being funded by public contributions is at least a little like being financed by reader subscriptions. But there’s a crucial difference between the BBC and the New York Times: In Britain, television viewers are required by law to pay a license that helps fund the broadcaster. The newspaper has no way of forcing anyone to do anything, and its digital product exists in an increasingly crowded marketplace.

I have written before about some of the things a new CEO could do in order to help the New York Times become a success in this new digital environment, including a focus on new forms of engagement with readers such as live events and other forms of “membership benefits” (in effect, a kind of reverse-paywall approach) instead of pinning all its hopes on a paywall. Could the NYT acquire something like Flipboard as a way of jump-starting its transition from being an information gatekeeper to being a digital curation machine? Possibly. But Mark Thompson doesn’t seem like the kind of CEO who would make that sort of bet.

The bottom line is that a business-as-usual or custodial approach is not going to cut it at the NYT, not when revenues are declining as rapidly as they have been. And shedding some staff or tweaking the product with a few digital bells and whistles isn’t likely to accomplish much either. The legendary paper doesn’t need someone to manage its business; it needs someone to reinvent it on a fairly fundamental level. Whether Mark Thompson is the man for that particular job remains to be seen.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user jphilipg

Under the agreement, on July 29, Hulu will start running the first three already-produced seasons of the satirical comedy, which focuses on the inner workings of the British government. It’ll run on both free-to-view Hulu and subscription-based Hulu Plus.

The fourth season of the show — which was created and written by Armando Iannucci, the mastermind behind HBO’s Julia Louis Dreyfus series Veep — will debut early next year simultaneously on Hulu and Hulu Plus with the U.K. premiere on BBC Four. (The verite-style show will later be broadcast on BBC America.)

“We’re really excited to give U.S. audiences a chance to catch up with all previous episodes, and as series co-producers for season four, we are proud to make full seasons of this distinctive and smart show available exclusively to Hulu viewers,” said Hulu Senior VP of Content Andy Forssell, in a statement.

The series will continue to be produced in-house at the BBC, but now “in association with Hulu,” according to the announcement. Details were not provided as to how Hulu is helping to underwrite the production.

The catch-up TV service on Tuesday became the latest TV app to launch in the Xbox Dashboard’s app initiative, for free with no subscription requirement (announcement).

Although the BBC has become reluctant to custom-build iPlayer apps for the burgeoning number of new devices, Xbox Kinect’s TV interface represents a sufficiently interesting new opportunity.

Users can swipe through iPlayer’s menus as well as navigate programming by voice control.

iPlayer had been available on Wii and Playstation 3 as an app and through the web browser for some time now. They made up five percent of iPlayer requests in September.

The BBC’s Xbox delay were the Xbox’s lack of web browser and, paidContent understands, that Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) had initially wanted to give access only to paid-up Xbox Live Gold members – something which would have run contrary to the stipulation that the BBC must provide its services free at the point of use to UK license fee payers.

But Microsoft’s stance thawed late in 2011 when it announced several TV partners would bring in Xbox apps that could be outside as well as inside its Gold subscription.

I would expect Xbox to become one of the platforms on which iPlayer is most used.

paidContent has learned the BBC executive wants to make all its shows available as download-to-own (DTO) at prices including £1.89 per show, under a scheme called Project Barcelona.

It has been negotiating for rights with independent producers that make some of the shows. They support the aims of the scheme, believing it could represent a new revenue opportunity and a defence against piracy.

But the producers, through their umbrella organisation Pact, have so far declined to give their outright blessing, citing uncertainty over revenue share, exclusivity and the potential for cannibalising DVD sales. They have asked for more detailed assurances.

The project, which has not been announced, could be one of the most radical in the BBC’s 85-year history. UK viewers already pay an £145.50 annual license fee under the BBC’s Royal Charter.

Currently, new TV and radio shows are available to watch or listen to again via the multi-platform iPlayer service for up to 30 days after transmission. After that period, rights are passed to the commercial outfit BBC Worldwide or back to shows’ original producers, who each license them to commercial services including iTunes Store and Blinkbox for paid consumer access.

But the BBC is upset that only seven percent of its archive repertoire is available through third parties in this way. So it wants to make the remaining 93 percent available through an own-brand service. The most notable departure is that even new shows from the public service window, not just old classics, would be available for paid download immediately after transmission. A previous news report had said the scheme would leverage only archive.

The BBC is promising producers a greater share of episode download prices than iTunes Store – an average £0.40 on a £1.89 episode fee compared with £0.28 from iTunes, which takes a 30 percent commission. The corporation would handle operational costs like encoding on producers’ behalf. It thinks it can unlock at least £13 million in revenue in the next five years for independent producers.

According to information seen by paidContent, the project is “about making what is effectively seen as non-commercial programming available to the market at a price and ease of use that will encourage consumers to purchase programmes that the commercial market would not make available due to the poor returns and risk involved”.

Some indies do not want to give exclusive rights to Barcelona. The BBC has promised producers can also go on licensing their own shows elsewhere – for example, to iTunes.

Even if the BBC wins suppliers’ eventual full backing, its executive must still put the scheme forward for the approval of the regulating BBC Trust, which, upon public consultation, would likely hear opposition to any plans to charge a secondary fee for publicly-funded BBC content.

If approved, Barcelona could lay groundwork for a pay-for BBC in a post-analogue, post-linear world. But, so far, it concerns only the download-to-own market – a model that may yet diminish as streaming alternatives, which provide cloud-based access but not ownership, grow in popularity.

After previously capping the BBC license fee, the UK government recently urged the BBC to generate more money for itself.

The BBC later told paidContent: “In addition to BBC iPlayer, the BBC already makes some of its content available on a download-to-own (DTO) basis.

“Any proposal to extend this facility would require not just the support of the industry but formal approval by the BBC executive and the BBC Trust.”