Opinion: Free stuff is digital gold

A PC under my TV

The other key aspect of the internet as a distribution medium is its sheer convenience. In the madness of the dotcom bubble it was assumed that bricks-and-mortar retailing would cease to exist. Why would anyone (bleated the evangelists) bother to go to the shops when they have a far, far wider selection online and they don’t even need to leave the house?

Of course since then we have realised that, in the case of tangible, high-value or aesthetic products like clothes or jewellery or houses, people understandably like to have a quick look at the thing before they buy it. But where a product is relatively cheap, has consistent quality and has no physical form, t’internet is ideal. Welcome to the world of digital media distribution.

The web should be a god-send for record, TV and movie companies, but peer-to-peer file sharing, which after the early humbling of Napster has come back with a vengeance in the form of BitTorrent and its contemporaries, has forced the collective hand of the digital media industry.

Right now it seems to be losing the battle against file sharing, which allows people to acquire digital media for free. This is illegal, but it has now become so difficult to prosecute file sharers and thus to contain the practice, it’s clear that DRM and litigation aren’t the answers.

The digital media industry is now so desperate to address this potentially terminal problem that it is seriously looking into offering content for free. The thinking being that people are going to get this stuff for free anyway, they might as well get it from us and we’ll see if we can flog advertising against it. Possibly the most prominent pioneer of this, ironically, is the one media company that has no pressure to generate profit at all.

This brings us to the part that’s relevant to the PC channel – yes, patient reader, there is one. The inspiration for this piece came on Sunday morning, when I was looking for clips of the English rugby team stomping the Irish one. The BBC website offered a video clip using its iPlayer, which inspired me to go to the BBC iPlayer homepage.

Within minutes I was watching a full 30 minute episode of That Mitchell and Webb look, streamed, full-screen on to my monitor. The process was so easy – I didn’t even have to register, let alone pay – that I thought maybe this could be the catalyst for mainstream uptake of digital home technology that the whole technology industry seems to have been waiting forever for.

I spend more time sat at this computer than I care to admit. Much as I love Mitchell and Webb and Rugby, I really don’t want to watch it sat in my office, surrounded by reminders of all the work I have yet to do. But I really like Mitchell and Webb. And Rugby. And my wife likes Love Soup and Gavin and Stacey and my kids like Top Gear and CBeebies. And I certainly don’t want to let them near my PC.

So my point is, if I wasn’t prepared to do it before, maybe the incredible amount of great telly being made available to me for free by the BBC iPlayer will be the what makes me go to the shops and get a PC to put under my TV. If it is, I’ve got a few hundred quid, that I wouldn’t otherwise have spent, to offer the first retailer I find that can do the job.