British Broadcast Corporation seems to have come up with a pretty decent business idea. BBC is known for its excellent documentaries, movies and lot, lot more. The videos it has released over the decades are a precious archive. And now BBC plans to launch a video market of its own where this video will be available digitally for a reasonably low price, quite like the content offered at Apple’s iTunes.
According to the report by Paid Content, BBC plans to launch an iTunes-like model where content will be available online as download-to-own (DTO). The pricing of the content is said to be placed at a tag of £1.89 per show. The entire project is being named as Project Barcelona by BBC.
BBC is currently negotiating with a number of content producers to take them on board before it actually launches the service. And actually, the success of such a venture depends very highly upon the number and names of the content producers that BBC is able to break a deal with. BBC does have an edge in the sense that it has a lot of original content that was produced and launched from BBC’s own platform in the past, but that content does not necessarily fall in the category of entertainment. In fact, most of it doesn’t.
The broadcast corporation is also trying to lure the producers by offering them a greater cut. Reportedly, out of the £1.89 per episode that BBC plans to charge, it plans to hand out £0.40 to the producers. Such an incentive can be particularly effective to get the major content producers on board. The project is said to be “about making what is effectively seen as non-commercial programming available to the market at a price and ease of use that will encourage consumers to purchase programs that the commercial market would not make available due to the poor returns and risk involved.”
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