Freedom Day

Freedom Day in this house is the first of March, the day after Nomad's last TV Licence expired. A year on, it is worth reviewing how things have gone.

Despite a letter from TV Licensing (the BBC) every month threatening me with increasingly severe punishments, I have yet to be hauled before the magistrates. No one has even knocked on my door.

On the whole the year has been a success from a technical viewpoint. The KISS1600 media player, while more or less obsolete, has more than earned its money. Similarily Miro and TVersity have proven to be great products. There are bugs and these can be an irritant; hopefully further development will resolve them.

Politically the status quo has held as there have been no moves to change the law. With an election on the way, Labour have now run out of time to change things. It is still unclear what the Conservatives plan to do but it is apparent that they are not well disposed to the BBC. There remains a danger that they may trade a cap on the licence fee (say) for an extension of the licence to cover the internet.

The major disappointment of the past year has been that the availability of media has not grown as fast as might have been expected. In particular the failure of Hulu to get itself up and running in the UK has probably delayed more widespread adoption of video on demand. Internet video remains a young medium. Looking at the most popular podcasts on PodcastDirectory.com, for example, 9 out of the top 20 are pornographic and 2 are techie. We seem to recall that last time we looked there was an even higher proportion of porn. For some reason the porn industry are always early adopters. From betamax onwards they have been at the front. The prevalence of porn indicates that the medium has not yet become mainstream. We still think that this is going to happen. When it does the BBC will be in trouble.