Thursday, March 15, 2007

BBC shuts down failed £150m online service

An amazing amount of public money appears to have gone to waste after a flood of complaints to the BBC over its BBC Jam service. The BBC Trust released a statement, saying, "Despite a rigorous approval process... BBC Jam has continued to attract complaints from the commercial sector about the parameters of its activities."



read more | digg story

4 comments:

The Frase said...

Wow! Thats the first I've heard about this!

I worked on two of the Jam projects. The last one is (WAS) due to go live quite soon!

Zot said...

Yeah, bummer hey? Sorry to hear about your stuff, but (hopefully) at least you got paid some of that £150 million!!

The Frase said...

Yeah- I got paid! But only a few of those millions!
As the article stated- the projects were subjected to VERY rigorous approval process to make sure it was accessable and usuable for it's target audience- school kids. So you had some pretty cool stuff being produced by a variety of studios (who had to pitch for the jobs).


The bummer is that it didn't "fail".
It's been suspended by the European Social Commission due to a case from software developers upset that they were having their lunch cut by the BBC in delivering e-learning to schools.

Zot said...

I hear ya bro. It sounds like a bit of a shamozzle.