New to YouTube: The Beeb

More in the push-pull of the online video world: Viacom is pleased as punch to have taken the hard line against YouTube as of last October, but the British Broadcasting Corporation -- the BBC, or the Beeb to its friends -- has just made a deal to create BBC and BBC Worldwide channels on YouTube, along with a channel for BBC News clips.

This is just the latest in the Beeb's ongoing embrace of and experimentation within the digital world. Years ago, when they started digitizing their radio archives, they released an astonishing collection of audio clips online, featuring interviews with political and artistic notables ranging from Chinua Achebe to Charles M. Schulz to Steven Spielberg. More recently, they've released some of their software as open source, and, for a while, released hundreds of audio, video and image assets for the public to download and use as they wanted. Let's see where they go from here.