


In post-Hutton 2004, startup investor and former BBC strategy manager Azeem Azhar proposed a "BBC Public Licence" that would allow both the public and business to use BBC content and code to build on, play with and share. It seems his vision is finally coming to life. "Four years on, the BBC is in a much stronger position to do this," says Azhar. "It has the opportunity to create a new ecosystem, just as MySQL [the open source database system], as a platform, created an ecosystem around itself."

Steve Bowbrick, recently commissioned to initiate a public debate about openness at the corporation, thinks empowerment could be as important as the traditional Reithian mantra, "Educate, inform and entertain."

"The broadcast era is finished," he says. "The BBC needs to provide web tools and a new generation of methods and resources that will boost [its] capital, but that will also use the BBC as a platform for promoting the individuals, organisations and businesses that make up UK plc."

What could the BBC create? It sits on a vast content resource, much of which is already being digitised under the BBC Archive scheme. It will take until 2022 to digitise material around each programme, from transcripts, audio, D notices and expenses to letters of complaint. The most significant part of the archive - 900,000 hours of TV and radio programmes - is likely to be the last thing to be digitised because of the complex rights issues.

BBC internet controller Tony Ageh says the notion of a dusty archive is now redundant; in the web era, everything is permanent and everything is, or should be, accessible. He says the BBC should be seen as not simply a programme-maker or a distributor, but as both. "There must be a way to achieve both of these outcomes, without harming the BBC, that would massively increase the viability of some SMEs and invigorate the entire UK ecosystem. Given what's going on in the world, this would be a very good time for such an injection of resources and support."

The iPlayer is one technology that could be opened up so that startups could build complementary services around it. In regional news, the BBC could make all its video reports, audio, text and comments available to commercial rivals and trigger a renaissance in local journalism. And it could allow people to remix BBC news footage for themselves, perhaps for a "day you were born" birthday present or a significant football match.

This new commitment to openness demands both a full and direct conversation with people outside the BBC, and a substantial technological commitment. The BBC has begun to initiate a more open debate through blogs, but generally its communications are ferociously managed through conventional PR.

The BBC has a number of initiatives including Innovation Labs, during which the BBC works with content-focused startups; Backstage, which offers a selection of BBC content for developers to build with; and the hack festival Mashed. It has already dabbled with a new generation of more flexible, web-native licence agreements, releasing its video compression technology Dirac as an open-source project. The licence means its code is available for free to be reused and improved. Mike Butcher, editor of TechCrunch UK, has reinvigorated this discussion in the startup sector. "People ask why there aren't more startups in the UK, but much of our talent is inside the BBC. The BBC should be the place that reflects the cultural life of our nation and that should include our technological innovation."

Bowbrick's enthusiasm for openness is tempered by his conviction that the UK startup scene is not ready for the tsunami of material that the BBC could unleash.

"We're really in the first seconds of the first hour of all this," he says. "We always assume we're later than we are, but really - the second era of the BBC starts here."