A month or two back, the BBC put a good chunk of archive television material on its iPlayer service, that you can find under ‘From The Archive’ tab on the service. But it looks as though that might be the start of the expansion of the service, with BBC Director General Tony Hall revealing that a paid-for segment of iPlayer that opens up a fuller back catalogue is under discussion.
The BBC shut down its digital store earlier this year after just 18 months, that was selling old episodes of its shows for a couple of quid a piece. And Hall has now told a committee of MPs that “we are looking at ways… to allow people to access the back catalogue … that costs something because you pay for that access”.
“The charter agreement allows us to experiment with those sort of services”, he added. “At the moment the way to access programmes like Dad’s Army or EastEnders is through UKTV and we need to look at ways of doing what we do there, through UK TV linear services, into an on-demand environment”.
Hall put no timescale on the plans. We’ll let you know if and when we hear more about them…