During last summer the web-based tv Babelgum and the BBC have signed an agreement for the distribution of some contents on the Babelgum platform. This meant the creation of three new channels based on this stuff: BBC-love Earth, BBC-Entertainment and BBC-Knowledge. So now you can watch clips from Top Gear or David Attenborough’s Life in the Freezer just clicking on the relative icon.
On the new channels you can’t watch entire shows from the BBC, but only clips. I think this is due to the fear that people won’t watch them on old tv_. What strikes me is that it means I can enjoy exactly just the things I really want to watch. Here you can find simple contributions of the Private Life of PlantsPlants, and you don’t have to watch all of this stuff you get bored with while you are waiting for the only thing you’re interested in. Of course you can find just some contributions, not all the contributions. But I think it’s interesting the way you can watch a scientific or naturalistic documentary now. You can choose between a huge number of 2/3 minutes videos, like having a brunch with just fingerfoods.
Babelgum is only a system that distributes professional video content on the web. It is based only on recorded material, not live stuff. And you can watch all their stuff only through their client. But almost everything is for free and of good quality. At the moment you can find several channels of scientific stuff, never hard sciences, but relaxing naturalistic documentaries, an entire channel dedicated to green issues, one on technology topics, and so on.
Babelgum tv is not really different from the idea of having an old tv on you computer, but most of the things are worthwatching. The quality of the video is good and the client software rarely goes on crash.
If it’s genuinely good programming, it’s probably more rewarding to see the whole programme – that’s certainly true of the BBC’s natural history output.
For clips there is this thing called, um, YouTube… and a search on there with ‘BBC’ yielded nearly half a million clips. So what’s the added value of Babelgum?
If it is official, it won’t be breaking copyright. The qiality may also be better.
Well yes there is that and I don’t approve of people posting whole programs/films in 10 minute chunks. But as a way of giving people a taster of what they might then seek out legitimately YouTube works well.
I don’t think image quality is such an issue. Plus there’s some good original work on there…! And then there is some great work.
@Stephen: I think that image quality is an issue. Most of the video broacasters on the web have this topica s one of the main issues, because they have to find out a right compromiase between quality and the speed of data transmission.
The difference between Youtube’s clips and Babelgum’s is in the level of professionism. Babelgum is a professional tv. And this assures a standard level.