Ashley Highfield, head of BBC New Media:
“Our aspiration is to make it really simple – we have got to make the web as easy as just pressing the red button on interactive TV and I think that is something we can do.
“Clearly those people who have already got broadband are the early adopters and I am not sure they are the people who will tip it for the majority.”
The BBC is also working on other ways to increase consumer interest in broadband. Mr Highfield is considering “broadbanderising” the BBC website, which gets 10m visitors a month.”
“Broadbanderising?” Apart from it being an abomination of a word worthy of Dubya – has this man never heard of Loosemore’s Law? Make the web like TV? I know the BBC is meant to provide stuff the market cannot, but when the market walked away from interactive TV, they might have been on to something. Didn’t he learn anything at his previous companies?
Gah! Why am I letting the BBC still stress me out! I have no words. So I’ll take someone elses:
“He who prides himself on giving what he thinks the people want is creating a fictitious demand for lower standards which he will then satisfy.”
Lord Reith would have made people love the command line, bless ‘im.
Petafloptimism 
Absolutely positively completely could not agree more. The only part of the BBC that doesn’t treat the internet like something they have to sugar coat and feed to the thickies is News and are – as a result – they’ve produced the best and most obviously web-native site of the lot. The idea that the best and most moral thing that the BBC thing can do is hobble people’s experience of the internet until it’s both simple and ultimately useless is fucking insulting, degrading, paternalistic shite and fucking sickens me. The whole emphasis on interactive television also pisses me off beyond belief. The last time I was with my family I saw them using Ceefax and asked them why they weren’t using the interactive television 24/7 stuff and their answer was simple and basic – Ceefax was a hell of a lot quicker and did just as much. And some of these supposedly interactive programmes aren’t interactive for shit – they’re just two channels that you can switch between through software rather than by pressing a button on your remote control. That’s really empowering people to engage with the information around the program. The audience for broadcast television starts to slump and rather than work to engage people in an actual dialogue, they put all their bloody effort into trying to make it just that little bit more sticky so that people won’t do what – in time – most of them will end up doing eventually anyway – go and play a game or fuck around on the internet with their mates.
Gak!! I cant believe he says that. He’s slipped to an all time low in stupidity. Make it as easy as pressing the red button!! At the point when less and less people are pushing the red button and no one can figure out how to use all this interactive stuff on the telly. I repeat what I’ve said a number of times “Go back to ****ing old skool TV you moron!”