BBC moves to embrace remix culture

I discovered today that the BBC are behind a project called Masher. Masher essentially enables people to splice and mash their own video’s with content from the BBC Motion gallery.

This is the second move the BBC have made to recognise how people want to view and use content.

The launch of the iPlayer was monumental because it enabled people to watch BBC content when and wherever they liked. The BBC recognised that they couldn’t beat pirate culture so instead they launched a service, which enabled people to watch their content on demand at their own pace.

The launch of masher I believe symbolises the BBC’s recognition of remix culture. There are so many people on youtube using illegally ripped video content to make their own remixed and mashed videos, like piracy, remixing is a movement that the BBC or any other broadcaster will not be able to stop. The BBC offering their archive for this project symbolises a degree of acceptance towards the remix movement.

I am sure this will be the first of many UK broadcaster’s stepping up to accept the movement and I hope in time they make the embed codes for the mashed videos available and allow users to download mashed videos and distribute them however they like.

Let’s watch, wait and see what happens next.