In March 2009 the BBC began letting its video be embedded on other websites. The first clips appeared in the technology section of the BBC News site, among them a report on internet football fans and coverage of the Bafta Video Game Awards. Andy Dickinson, who put one of them on his own blog, asked how cool that was.
The corporation described the delay as a matter of a large number of tricky little issues, most of them complex business questions around rights and terms and conditions. The move was part of a wider strategy to open up BBC content, announced alongside major changes to the content management and publishing systems behind the News and Sport sites.
The small print set the limits. Embedding was for personal websites; the supplied code had to be used and the video or audio left unedited; the BBC could remove the material without notice and made it available at the user’s own risk; it could not be placed on sites carrying illegal or offensive material; viewers outside the UK might see an error message; and an embed was not an endorsement of the host site. In practice the clips could be passed along but not remixed or mashed up.
One limitation was on this side of the transaction: a blog hosted on WordPress.com had no way to embed BBC video at all, and the post ended hoping for a shortcode that would allow it.