BBC distributes tech show under Creative Commons license

The BBC has published the first broadcast of the tech program R&D TV on its site. The program is distributed free of charge and under a Creative Commons license, including the raw video material for remixing purposes.

With the tv show the British public broadcaster wants to experiment with new program formats, licenses and digital distribution methods. The entire first episode, which includes Kevin Rose of Digg.com as a guest, can be downloaded for free via the BBC site in various video formats. A five-minute summary is also freely available.

The BBC offers not only the R&D TV show, but also the raw source material with a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.0 Generic license. The broadcaster encourages viewers to get started with this material themselves, for example in the form of mash-ups, but commercial reuse is not possible with this license not allowed.

The downloads are currently still offered on the site via the FTP protocol, but the broadcaster is considering using the bittorrent protocol. The SwarmPlayer from P2P-Next, which was developed with EU funds, is a candidate for this. The program makers also want to place all episodes on YouTube, Blip.tv and Archive.org.