BBC's "Creative Future"; a film buff's question

Director General Mark Thompson's RTS speech on Tuesday is well worth reading in full. If you'd rather bleed, here's a summary: digital's impact on the future will be "disruptive" but ultimately brilliant.

"All media – sound, picture, text – available on all devices, all the time. Searchable, movable, share-able."

The plan is for a multimedia platform called (alas) the "BBC i-player".

What can we look forward to?:

• Individual "drag-and-drop" TV-radio channels within 5 years. (New programming and archive material.)

• Viewer-created content and distribution.

Please note: "This does not necessarily mean more content – it means extracting more value from content."

The one thing you won't see, apparently, is a film channel. "Channel 4 aims to make FilmFour free-to-air. That's a great idea – but a film channel doesn't fit into our mission or our public purposes and we won't launch one."

That's interesting, because it seems to be slightly at odds with the free-for-all described above. If I want to watch movies (whichever the BBC has the rights to) all night, all week or all year, will I be discouraged or prevented?

Will this "always on" aspect necessitate further hold-backs on big studio movies?

Perhaps the reason for the bias towards news output in this speech is that it's one of the least contentious fields in terms of rights issues. Film, of course, is one of the trickiest.

Read the speech in full

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