La BBC ha presentado un proyecto de mundo virtual llamado CBBC World, canal destinado a niños de 7 a 12 años. Este mundo virtual, CBBC World, será habitado por avatares completamente personalizables con los que se podrá intercambiar información.
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Virtual worlds kind of freak me out, honestly. But, I think for the right demographic on an entertainment platform, it can be a good draw for the audience.

“Kids that age should be out playing in parks and kicking a football about…” — Kyle sounds like my mother 25 years ago.

The BBC Click programme has featured it with one of TechCrunch’s own contributors and there’s loads of articles on the BBC News site on it.

Fletch,

I do find it a little confusing. The BBC has been forced to drop a number of things I really enjoyed because it “could” be done by the commercial sector. And then something like this is announced. Needless to say, those programmes and ideas have not been recreated outside the BBC.

Surely this would/should have had a Public Value Test, just like the Hi Def trial and iPlayer?

This is probably a part of the BBCs efforts to try and reduce the drop-out rate that they have from CBeebies (

My experience of US / Canadian broadcasting is a huge quantity of channels but dreadful quality, the same is true of what’s available on the Cable and Satellite channels here in the UK. I just yesterday cancelled my full TV package that I have with Telewest primarily due to the poor quality of shows and endless repeats (and they thought it was ok to ‘increase’ the price for that?!!).

The BBC channels give much better programming than the commercial channels. Speaking as a parent of a 4 year old, the CBeebies channel is excellent as my 4 year old is not barraged with adverts every 10 minutes like it tends to be on the commercial channels.

Also, let’s not forget that the BBC is investing a lot to make as much programming available to view online as possible, they’re doing a lot of really interesting stuff that just adds to the value of the licence fee.

That’s my opinion anyway!

My only thoughts on it are that if they create it on an open source platform then they should release it.

The people complaining about the licence fee being wasted on this should look at the digital tv roll out that the bbc is being stuck with (I.E having to pay for digital settop boxes for people that can’t afford them).

I have no problem with the concept of public broadcasting, but surely the beeb shouldn’t be doing things that CAN be done by the private sector. A virtual world - seems very ‘me too’. It also drives out competition because its hard to compete with free (read Radio1).

I hear the licence fee is going up to £130 next year. I bet you’d have a hard time convincing americans to pay $250 for public broadcasting!

http://www.larian.com/kick.php

Or if your language skills are up to it:

http://www.ketnetkick.be/

Aparently its actually been in development for quite a while.

Im no fan of CNN, but Al Jazeera is very anti semitic and biased against the United States. The validity of their stories has also come into question on several occasions. So for quality of broadcasting I would rank Al Jazeera below CNN.

I respectfully disagree.

I wonder whether the creation of world items be the part of such creation possibilities? I mean player’s ability to change almost everything in the game world, landscape too. For example, some players community decides to flow a river between 2 existing hills etc.

Another good point is user’s ability to upload new items into game world, for example, someone designs new sword and takes it into the game etc.

Al Jazeera English -> BBC -> France24 -> CNN International -> CNN, etc.

Really, anything below the BBC’s level is just about worthless, though.

As for the BBC, is this product part of their taxpayer-funded core mission? Other than that question, though, I’d fully expect the BBC to cover themselves as best they could. Don’t see anything controversial there.

As far as announcing a competitor to SecondLife - i say why bother? Roll out a simple social networking flash app/game, and grow it to be whatever you want. No need to let potential competitors in on your plans. Again, though, what is the mission of the BBC?