BBC Jam

» see jam.bbc.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

bbc jam was uk-only at the license fee layer. you reached it from a british school or a british home, and the whole argument for it existing was that british households had already paid for it in advance. i was in my early twenties in 2006, at university in turkey, and there was never going to be a version of this that included me.

it was commissioned in 2003, by the culture secretary, under the bit of the bbc charter that obliges the corporation to promote education. it was called the digital curriculum for the first three years, which is what a thing is called before anybody in marketing gets to it. it went live as jam on 27 january 2006, free to anybody in the country between five and sixteen.

the budget was a hundred and fifty million pounds. about forty five million of that was set aside for work commissioned from outside production companies rather than made inside the bbc, which is one of the reasons the number is so large. two hundred people worked on it.

before it launched, the bbc agreed with becta, the government's educational technology body, that jam would cover no more than half of the learning outcomes that could sensibly be taught with a computer. that ceiling was written in specifically so the commercial market would have somewhere left to stand. it did not help.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what was actually on it ~

the material was tied to the national curriculum across england, wales, scotland and northern ireland, and ran from math and science through geography and business studies. it was interactive rather than a pile of worksheets, which in 2006 meant a great deal of flash.

two things about it are worth keeping. the material was not english-only: welsh versions existed, and so did irish and scottish gaelic, which almost nothing else on the web was doing at that scale. accessibility was a condition of the commission rather than a later patch, so text could be read aloud and video carried subtitles from the start. by 2007 it had 170,000 registered users.

~ who complained ~

commercial producers of educational software went to the european commission and argued that the bbc was outside its public service remit, handing schools for free what a market was already selling. the shape of the complaint is state aid: a publicly funded body using public money to occupy commercial ground. brussels asked for a separate review, on top of a review the bbc trust had already scheduled for later that year.

the trust decided on 14 march 2007 that two consecutive regulatory reviews were not worth it. acting chairman chitra bharucha said they would be unnecessarily bureaucratic and complex, with serious implications for delivery of the service to license fee payers, and that the trust would suspend the service in full and ask bbc management to come back with fresh proposals. jam went dark on 20 march. the fresh proposals were to face a full public value test at the trust and a market impact assessment at ofcom, which is a long way of saying that nothing was going to happen quickly.

~ what got buried with it ~

the posts went first. the bbc announced job closures following the suspension on 14 may 2007, two months after the site stopped serving. then the proposals sat, and on 28 february 2008 the guardian reported what everybody involved had worked out for themselves: there would be no relaunch. ninety six million pounds of the hundred and fifty had been spent by then.

what makes this one sting is that the work existed. it was written, filmed, translated into three minority languages and captioned, and then it was switched off over a regulatory question about who was allowed to give it away. almost none of it is reachable now. the argument that killed jam was about competition in a market for school software, and the market it was protecting mostly went to american companies inside a decade anyway.

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