Top Gear on YouTube

Top Gear series 13 returns to BBC Two on Sunday 21 June 2009. Find out more…

I posted a while ago about bbc.co.uk/topgear moving all their video clips from Real (urghhh) to Flash and even adding many more. Well now they’ve gone to YouTube as well.

Actually that is a little bit of a simplification – bbc.co.uk/topgear hasn’t gone to YouTube, it is topgear.com that has.

TG is one of those parts of the BBC that serves two masters. It has its home and primary master – the great public service master, the god of great content – the BBC on one hand.

On the other side it has the god of money, the great capitalist in the ground – BBC Worldwide. This is the future of the BBC and the part that will gradually feed and fund the rest of the licence fee deprived Aunty.

But this isn’t a post about BBC funding, it isn’t a post about the licence fee or whether it is a good/bad or flawed but acceptable idea. This is a post about Top Gear and more specifically the all new Top Gear You Tube Channel.

There are several reasons for this channel and why it exists in addition to the Top Gear Video pages on bbc.co.uk/topgear, the Top Gear videos on topgear.com and even the TG vids on the BBC You Tube Channel.

1) By being branded as a BBC Worldwide channel it gives the BBC the abiltity to make advertising revenue from the clips.

2) It means the clips can be made available outside the UK (bbc.co.uk videos are UK only).

3) It gives the BBC access to an audience that might not normally have watched anything by the BBC – although this doesn’t really apply to Top Gear as it reaches a pretty varied audience anyway.

On the point of reaching people that don’t normally watch the BBC – although Aunty has started to allow embedding of certain flash videos from their site – this is yet another selection of YouTube clips from the BBC with embedding disabled.

The only on that seems to be allowed is the initial introducing by Mikey Harvey, Editor of Top Gear Magazine (the area of the business that will be running this channel).

The introduction to the above video says “The day has finally arrived! Check out this video welcoming YOU to Top Gear’s new home on YouTube! Mikey Harvey, Editor of Top Gear Magazine, gives you a taste of what to expect.”

I’m not sure why the BBC has a phobia of allowing their videos to be embedded – it is slowly being introduced in a few places like Britain from the Air and Torchwood – but none of the news clips are embeddable, iPlayer (obviously) isn’t embeddable and neither are most of the clips on the various You Tube channels.

If the BBC could get over its anti embedding issues (it is possible the issues are with third party rights of course) then it could really open up new markets.

Not everybody goes to YouTube, not everybody that doesn’t watch the BBC goes to YouTube so if you make all clips on YouTube and as many clips as possible on bbc.co.uk available for people to easily embed in their own sites, in their own MySpace, Message Board et al profiles then you will reach a MUCH greater audience than just having them on YouTube and bbc.co.uk.

OK so you can fairly easily go into the source code of the page and get the Flash embed code and add the video to the page yourself but it is a faff and sometimes not really worth the effort.

Oh and apparently Top Gear will be back on our screens in the third week of October.

While your at YouTube why not check out the BBC Jersey Channel (youtube.com/bbcjersey) or the Up Your Ego one (youtube.com/upyourego).

I’m now waiting for the Top Gear Twitter stream – there are dozens of BBC Twitter feeds from Today to the Olympics so why not Top Gear.

Oh and BBC Jersey is on Twitter at twitter.com/bbcjersey and I’m on there at twitter.com/upyourego.