The BBC Trust has been urged to block the corporation’s plans to launch phone apps for its news and sport content.

The Newspaper Publishers Association (NPA) said that the corporation would “damage the nascent market” for apps.

The group said that it would also raise the issues with the the Department of Culture, Media and Sport and MPs on the Media Select Committee.

The full article can be accessed here.

Any UK residents have any comments?

The BBC’s content is already available free on the web. These objections seem irrelevant to me. If you want to kill the taxation funded BBC to make it “fair” for commercial broadcasters/publishers, that’s a valid point of discussion. But blocking particular forms of distribution doesn’t achieve the objective.

What this does highlight is the absence of a controlled distribution channel for timely mobile content distribution. That could be the iBookstore. Hence the current need for the BBC and others to get into iPhone apps.

sleepygeek - 19 February 2010 12:40 AM

The BBC’s content is already available free on the web.

...and for that I’m thankful. I am no longer able to get an NBC channel over the air, since the transition to digital TV. My daughter needed to watch the opening ceremonies of the Olympics for school, and we were able to find a BBC broadcast online. NBC missed their opportunity to have us staring at their web ads for a few hours. Their loss.

Apparently it will be released soon after the iPad makes its debut. I’m looking forward to its release. Perhaps now the BBC will take Apple and its products a bit more seriously.

DawnTreader - 21 February 2010 12:38 AM

Perhaps now the BBC will take Apple and its products a bit more seriously.

Unlikely Robert. Since the Quicktime / Real battle at the BBC and the influx of Microsofties both on the technology front and the web team there has been little love lost between Apple and the BBC. This is one of my main gripes against the BBC - if their technology reporting can be so biased how much more of their news output contains the same sort of bias?

The BBC used to be known for their fairness in reporting, these days not so much.