TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington calls for the End of The BBC!

File under ‘WTF’ and ‘ill-informed’.

[update: March 14th 2007: Long Live the BBC! ]

Apparently, during a panel at yesterday’s Future Of WebApps Conference, TechCrunch‘s Mike Arrington said ‘The BBC should be dissolved’. (see video here from BBC backstage’s Ian Forrester)

Listen here (edited) “The BBC Should Be Dissolved” : Mike Arrington : FOWA Feb 2007

download and share this mp3 here

And the longer version here 😉

download and share this mp3 here

Judging by the things he said, he clearly has no idea about how the BBC works in the UK. It *is* different to BBC World and he also gets some facts wrong about a kids social network.

I will agree to a point that the TV License (that every UK household who owns a TV is forced to pay) is often abused and unwisely spent on some astronomical salaries for many people who I happen to know first hand don’t have the required knowledge to make certain decisions. 😉

Who is this ‘kosso’ anyway?

I am a 'Createc'. A creative technologist, entrepreneur/ hacker/ geek. Worked on building things on the web for over 12 years.

Used to work at BBC News interactive and created the publishing and delivery systems for video news to get distributed on huge screens in major railway stations around the country.

I left the BBC to become CTO / sole-lead architect/developer at podcast.com for three years.

I have now left them to build a start up a new system called 'Phreadz', which is a 'Social Multimedia Conversation Network', integrating everything that is 'V.I.T.A.L' to us on the web. Video, Images, Text, Audio and Links.

I built the whole thing my myself. I programmed every line of code and positioned every pixel. I'm looking forward to attracting an hiring new members of the team to help me out! :)

There are currently over 1000 happy and helpful beta testers on the system so far and one client of a white-labelled solution.