Kangaroo is the latest project to be put on hold while a consultation is held to decide on its future. Julian Clover says let’s get on with it.
Suddenly the Librans have taken over the asylum. Those of us born between the end of September and mid October are known for their balance, the ability to see both sides of an argument and potentially indecisiveness, I think.
The British have always enjoyed the ability to form a committee. Why do something immediately when you can sit around and talk about it for months on end. You could say we did just that with digital terrestrial television; we may have been the first country to launch DTT transmissions, but we will be among the last to switch off, though unless you live in the Channel Islands within the EU’s 2012 deadline.
It may be the mood of our times, one feels it began with the election of Tony Blair’s New Labour government in 1997, but now everything has to be put out to ‘consultation’. Those familiar with the political satire Yes Minster will know that the objective of a consultation is to select a committee, the composition of which will come the closest to the outcome that you were trying to achieve.
In this instance it makes no difference if we are talking about public or private money. In the same way that the online TV venture Kangaroo now finds itself held back for six months while the Office of Fair Trading investigates a market that has barely got off the ground, so too Sky must wait for Ofcom to complete its deliberations on both the implications of its DTT project, but also the market as a whole.
It is not that either of these projects should be rushed through the decision making process, nor should any public body run roughshod over competition issues, but a little more commonsense and a little less bureaucracy wouldn’t go amiss.
The BBC’s influence over the internet is clearly an area where someone should keep an eye on public money, and the potential impact on commercial rivals, but balance this against the alternative where the young in particular are given a view on the world drawn largely Google, Yahoo and MSN.
Kangaroo faces the same problem; surely the OFT is not going to argue that Kangaroo should be ‘broken up’ before it even gets off the ground. It’s hardly as if iTunes needs the protection. The irony here is that BBC Worldwide, ITV and Channel 4 have all made their content available on Apple’s video portal and if the lists of the most popular downloads are anything to go by then this was a shrewd move. Unlike Kangaroo, Apple is already available, and as the BBC iPlayer has itself demonstrated it has the brand.
