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Friday, March 14

BBC finally embedding video


As I noted a while back the BBC had started embedding video - on the occasional tech page/blog - and has now decided to use Flash Video embedding everywhere around the news site. The details are announced today on their Internet blog.

Which is all good but the blog post doesn't explain why they aren't providing the embed code for others which other big media players are starting to allow. See clip reuse en masse in the US Primaries.

This is also obvious to me in the Madhi Kazemi campaign, I end up with Sky clips but not CNN when the latter has done a much better job, and seeing that would undoubtedly help their credibility/viewership. Just linking doesn't cut it any more when someone else's clip is right there.

This all seems a bit daft when they evidentially aren't policing the reuse of their clips via YouTube/LiveLeak etc. You could also make the argument that if you want to reach - for example - da youth, then allowing them to reuse your stuff, especially news clips, on their blogs and Bebo pages would be one good way of doing that.

There wouldn't be that many copyright issues either, you'd think, since it's BBC News, not some third party.

On the one hand they don't seem to mind their clips being reused/promoted (two sides of the same coin) but on the other they're not going to make it easy. That sounds like their defacto policy.

I assume the beeb behemoths are behind that decision ....

Simon Dickson (hat-tip) makes some good points on the implementation. Have they sacked all the usability experts?

PS: Still seeing that flat, unhelpful, bad communication '502' error message for failed comments, beeb people ...

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