BBC to Set Up Three YouTube Channels

Posted on March 2, 2007

The BBC has cut a deal with YouTube. The story is reported here on the BBC news website.

Three YouTube channels - one for news and two for entertainment - will showcase short clips of BBC content.
The BBC hopes that the deal will help it reach YouTube's monthly audience of more than 70 million users and drive extra traffic to its own website.

Two of the BBC's channels are already on YouTube: BBC and BBC Worldwide. The BBC will eventually offer news clips on YouTube when it launches a news channel later this year.

BBC News: The news channel, which will be launched later this year, will show about 30 news clips per day. It will be advertising funded like a similar deal with Yahoo USA. BBC News is also offered to non-UK subscribers of Real Networks.
Because of the advertising, these clips can be seen outside the UK only. Any UK users clicking on a link to one of the news clips on YouTube will get a message that they have no access to this clip.

It looks like the embedding feature has been disabled on the videos currently on the BBC YouTube channels which is unfortunate. It seems a little pointless to upload videos to YouTube and then disable embedding because disabling the embedding feature will limit the exposure and distribution of the videos. The BBC would get much more exposure to their videos if they let blogs ebmed the videos and show them to their readers. On the positive side at least the video content will be available in YouTube's video database. UK residents will not be able to see the videos due to a blackout requested by the BBC.