What appears to be a large effort to gain an international audience, the BBC has made a deal with MySpaceTV to allow a variety of show clips to be hosted there. The Guardian reports:
The partnership will initially see around 150 clips of BBC programming made available online via a dedicated BBC Worldwide channel on the social networking website’s video service, MySpaceTV.
Under the strapline “the best of British TV”, the channel will be divided into seven genres: comedy, drama, sci-fi, weird and wonderful, love earth, famous faces and Top Gear.
Below is a link to a few of the categories:
I wondered why BBC would be trying to gain such an international audience when much of its programming is not available to non-British viewers. Even the BBC YouTube channel is for UK users only. Then, I noticed this in the article:
A commercial version of the BBC iPlayer will serve programming to international audiences.
This is great news! I’ll line up to pay to watch BBC programming, even over the low-bandwidth internet. As it is now, most of my BBC viewing is done via YouTube.