Briefings - Stephen Fry

Jem recently put us on to Briefings. In this most recent lecture, Stephen Fry shares his thoughts on the future of public service broadcasting. He’s as intelligent and perceptive as you’ve expect. Here’s a short quote (from around 19m50s).

…It has the iPlayer on its site too, streaming content to UK users only. But hell, there’s ways round that. Streaming? Hardly: anything that can be played on your computer can be stored on it and shared. A digital copy is a perfect copy. Once on the net it’s out there and will be bit torrented and Limewired and Gnutella-ed and otherwise P2P distributed. The BBC is making a lot of enemies giving away free programmes to an internet that everyone else is trying to “monetise”; at the moment it’s relying on the fact that you have to be slightly dorky to record from the iPlayer, but believe me that will change…

There is a complete transcript here.