In an interview with the BBC during CES, former Apple CEO John Sculley discussed his relationship with Steve Jobs, as well as the perception that he was ousted from Apple due to poor performance.

Sculley was asked about his ousting, but wanted to set the record straight as to the company’s health at the time of his removal by Apple’s board in 1993:

When I left Apple it had $2bn of cash.

It was the most profitable computer company in the world – not just personal computers – and Apple was the number one selling computer. So the myth that I fired Steve wasn’t true and the myth that I destroyed Apple, that wasn’t true either.

A lot of things happened after I left before Steve came back.

The $2bn in cash that Apple had at the time is a far cry from Apple’s war chest in 2012. In fact, 19 years after that point Apple has $80bn more. Jobs returned to apple in 1997.

While Sculley told the BBC that he hasn’t read the Steve Jobs biography penned by Walter Isaacson, he has talked to many people who have, and doesn’t seem to think he was treated unfairly in it.

What’s John Sculley up to now? He’s an active investor and advisor in healthcare related startups.

One Life was released in cinemas across the UK on the 22nd of July, and the film is a “celebration of the most brilliant and imaginative stories of survival from the natural world”.

A product of BBC Earth Films, One Life uses cutting-edge cinema techniques to capture animal behavior and ingenuity in their natural environment.

The interactive trailer, however, is particularly impressive. Visit the One Life website, and you can ‘drag up’ on any screen to view snippets about the animal in that particular scene, or you ‘drag down’ to go behind the scenes and watch videos and interviews with the makers of the film.

London-based creative agency The Brooklyn Brothers was responsible for coming up with the concept of making the trailer the actual website for the film, and the company worked in conjunction with Stink Digital towards creating the final site. Lawrence Weber, from The Brooklyn Brothers, said:

“Rather than making a website, and putting the trailer on it, we thought it would be good to make the trailer the actual website, so it’s a linear journey from start to finish.”

BBC Earth Films, which is part of BBC Worldwide and represents the BBC Natural History Unit, is one of the world’s biggest natural history production houses. It was the same house that produced the likes of Deep Blue in 2004, and Earth The Movie in 2005.

Meanwhile, here’s the non-interactive version of the trailer, direct from YouTube:

We reported earlier on the launch of the new global BBC iPlayer, which is available today in 11 European countries: Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, The Republic of Ireland, The Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland.

But fans of BBC programming around the world will no doubt have a few lingering questions on the finer details. As such, BBC Click ran a Twitter question and answer session with the BBC.com Director earlier today, designed to clarify any outstanding queries. And here’s the answers…

Questions…answered

As we reported already, it will be available as an iPad app first of all, costing €6.99 a month, or €49.99 for a year’s subscription.

The first year is being treated as a pilot in Europe, and the US and Canada will be next to gain access to the global BBC iPlayer in Q4 2011. Australia will follow in Q4 2011/Q1 2012, accompanied perhaps by New Zealand, though this isn’t definite yet. Other countries will follow after Q1 2012, though which countries these will be remains to be seen.

Furthermore, fears from UK licence-fee payers that international users would be getting access to the same programmes for a fraction of the cost were allayed. A standard color TV Licence costs £145.50 per year, whilst someone in Europe could access the player for less than €50 per year, but it was noted that there will be a limited amount of new shows available. The international version is more of a video-on-demand (VOD) service, than a catch-up TV service.

Given that BBC programmes will now be more readily available in non-English speaking markets, the issue of subtitles was raised too. This is apparently a possibility further down the line, but not this year. The BBC sees its first big audience as anglophones.

Unlike the domestic version of iPlayer, radio won’t yet be available on the global iPlayer, because the international rights in radio are a little more tricky. However, audio programming could be added within a year.

As has already been reported, the global BBC iPlayer will include additional features not currently available on the UK player, such as the ability to stream shows over 3G. Plus, the international version enables users to download and store programmes on the iPad for offline viewing.

And what about those who don’t yet have iPads? Well, The global iPlayer will work on iPhones within the next 12 months, with other platforms possibly to follow after the pilot period.

2011 is set to be a big year for the BBC’s online operations outside the UK, as the international version of the corporation’s iPlayer on-demand video service prepares to launch.

Meanwhile, last week a pretty major change was made to the bbc.com homepage seen by visitors to the website from outside the UK. As we noted at the time, gone were the widget-based customisation options, replaced by a plainer, more functional version of the site.

With this in mind, we thought it was a good time to talk to Rebecca Conroy, Chief Operating Officer of BBC.com and the global iPlayer project to find out more about both.

While similar in some ways, the BBC’s UK and international websites are similar – they’re actually operated completely separately, with different goals. While in the UK, the site is designed to meet the corporation’s public service goals, BBC.com is operated by its commercial arm BBC Worldwide and carries banner advertising. “It’s international face of the BBC’s website so we keep across what is happening and being developed in the UK but all our international requirements are funded separately and are based on our international audience needs,” explains Conroy.

“BBC.com’s objectives are to provide the best digital news and sports service in the world whilst beginning to showcase some of the BBC Worldwide’s other great content such as the Travel section that we have developed in partnership with Lonely Planet (which is wholly owned by BBC Worldwide). We also aim to achieve this whilst being commercially successful.”

Globally, the site serves over 50 million unique visitors per month and works with over 600 advertising partners.

When too much choice is a bad thing

On Wednesday evening last week, our Editor-in-Chief, Zee – usually based in the UK – was holidaying in Thailand. A BBC website addict, he checks it several times per day. Suddenly, though, something had changed. Gone were the personalisation features that allowed, say, a technology news enthusiast to place the latest tech stories at the top of the screen, for the site’s colour theme to be changed and for . “It’s a pretty significant departure from the rather innovative homepage of the last few years,” Zee noted.

The old face of BBC.com, complete with customisable widgets

Indeed – BBC.com’s customisation options were based on those first launched on the BBC’s UK site back in late 2007. Back when these features first emerged on the UK site, Richard Titus – the then Acting Head of User Experience and Design –  said, “From a conceptual point of view, the widgetization adopted by Facebook, iGoogle and Netvibes weighed strongly on our initial thinking… This trend essentially abstracts the content from its presentation and distribution, atomizing content into a feed-based universe. Browsers, devices, etc therefore become lenses through which this content can be collected, tailored and consumed by the audience.”

In the UK, the widgetised site remains having survived and been built upon through two subsequent redesigns of the site and was even extended to mobile browsers in 2009. So, why has BBC.com dropped it for international visitors? The answer, says Rebecca Conroy, is simple – only 2% of users bothered to customise their websites. “It was a nice idea, but not many people made any customisations beyond setting the weather forecast for their location,” she explains.

In addition, all the fancy code needed to allow for the customisation was making the site slower to load. Stripping this out has allowed for a simpler, faster page that can better reflect the content BBC Worldwide wants to promote. “We updated the homepage to be able to carry more news stories on the page than before and also to be able to start showcasing more of our content – Sport and Travel now and other services we may decide to launch,” says Conroy. “We also wanted it to be in the look and feel of the new designs that are being rolled out across the BBC site, currently in News and soon to be in Sport, so it shared the same language.”

The new face of BBC.com outside the UK

Conroy feels the change has been a success because it’s received such little user feedback. “There’s not been a huge amount, and if you check Twitter, people have had good things to say about it. We achieved what we wanted to – a simple change without any disruptions.”

Interestingly, the BBC’s experience matches our own here at The Next Web. Last April we unveiled a highly customisable, widget-based homepage loosely based on the BBC’s format. The problem was that less than 5% of our readers actually customised their pages and the code needed to run all that customisation that no-one was using was slowing page load times significantly. Over Christmas, we replaced it with a new design that put access to information ahead of giving readers choice and found that traffic noticeably increased as users could get to what they wanted easily from a home page that didn’t take an age to load.

The question is, if customisation is so unpopular with users, does it have a future on the BBC homepage in the UK? We’re still waiting to hear back from the Corporation on that.

UPDATE: The BBC tells us that the customisation rate on the UK site is “Quite a bit higher” and there are  no plans to remove the customisation element. However, as announced in January, the UK site is soon to be restructured around ten key products.

Bringing the iPlayer to the world

The biggest project for BBC Worldwide’s online team this year will be the introduction of the international version of the iPlayer on-demand video service. In the UK, the service has rapidly become an institution. Last month, it received 160 million requests for TV and radio shows. We already know that the service will launch initially as an iPad app, as a subscription fee-based service. BBC Director General, Mark Thompson recently stated that the cost would be “A few dollars a month – less than $10.”

As Chief Operating Officer of the project, Conroy is well-placed to have all the insider details on exactly when and where it will be available. However, she’s staying tight-lipped on the specifics ahead of an official announcement “in due course”. In December, BBC.com managing director Luke Bradley-Jones said “We’re going to be adopting a pure paid subscription model for the global iPlayer for launch – in part to get audiences used to using the service, but more importantly so we can generate additional value from the service in terms of the user data that it gives us. We will also offer advertisers the chance to partner with us on the ‘free’ areas of the service.”

Don’t expect the international iPlayer to have access to the latest editions of Eastenders, Top Gear or Doctor Who, though. Conroy confirms that “It will showcase the best of British TV, but unlike the UK version will not be a catch up service.”

Big-name BBC shows like Top Gear and Doctor Who are popular targets for BitTorrent users around the world – a move highlighted by the BBC’s decision to transmit the new series of Doctor Who on the same day in the UK, the US and Canada for the first time from today. Pirates elsewhere are sure to be downloading the show straight after transmission though, and we’ll be watching with keen interest to see if BBC Worldwide can convert those fans into paying customers once the international iPlayer launches.

I recently picked up a physical newspaper and read it cover to cover for the first time in about a year. Upon seeing an article I disagreed with, I instinctively scanned the page for the comments box. There wasn’t one of course, but my instinct shows how natural it has become to expect an instant right to reply to any form of media.

While blogs, YouTube videos and most other forms of ‘new media’ embraced discussion right from their inception, ‘old media’ has largely resisted the change, preferring to separate content from the wider discussion that can often enrich it with additional details or hold it to account with criticism.

In the UK, BBC News has largely avoided direct commenting. If you wanted to discuss a story you had hope that the editors had deemed it suitable for the separate Have Your Say section of the site – or just go away and talk about it somewhere off-site, ruining any chance of a centralised debate on the issue.

Now, after having trialled it on a small number of stories in recent months, the site is set to roll out in-article commenting on a wider basis, but in a very ‘BBC’ way. The default view for the custom-built commenting solution is an ‘Editor’s Picks’ tab, that highlights reader comments that (in the words of the site’s social media editor Alex Gubbay) “showcase interesting additional insight and perspective”. Access to all (pre-moderated) comments is just a click away though, and users will soon be able to rate comments, helping to bring them to the attention of editors who can promote those they deem suitable across to the ‘Picks’ tab.

A cautious approach

Don’t expect to be able to comment on everything though. “Even at this point, we will still only enable it on a selection of content each day, determined by our editors and the news agenda,” writes Gubbay. You probably won’t have long to leave a comment either. This story, one of the testing grounds for the new system, has had comments closed just a couple of days after publication. These new commenting modules will replace the Have Your Say section, which is likely to be shuttered next month.

“It is a reflection of the changing online landscape and the advent of social media that we feel the time is now right to move on from Have Your Say,” write Gubbay. “This process is essentially about us online focusing more now on encouraging discussion around our content itself, rather than looking to host or manage a community.”

Coming from a blogging background, and as someone who tends to consume news almost entirely via the Web, part of me feels like shouting at the BBC that they’re taking far too soft an approach. Concocting this pre-moderated, selectively implemented ‘halfway house’ approach to commenting feels like an unhappy compromise for all concerned.

“Just add comments to every single post, and moderate them after publication to keep the discussion lively,” I feel like saying. User voting and editorial ‘picks’ could ensure that the ‘best’ comments rise to the top. Closing comments on stories, meanwhile, causes a frustrating user experience that ignores the ‘long tail’ of people reading an article days, months or years later.

Why it might better just to avoid comments altogether

The ‘softly softly’ approach the BBC is taking to interactivity is understandable, however. When you’re a source trusted by millions of people around the world to deliver reliable, accurate news, the danger of someone seeing something inaccurate posted in a comment and believing it “because they saw it on the BBC” is a real and potentially damaging one.

This is particularly relevant when you consider that it has an audience that ranges from web-savvy types like you or I right through to people who’ve never heard of Facebook, let alone posted any of their own content online. Having to pre-moderate comments to prevent this situation is a real bottleneck, as there simply wouldn’t be enough staff available to judge the relevance and accuracy of every single comment coming in if commenting was allowed on every single story.

What’s more, many of the comments on Gubbay’s post are critical of the move. “Previously,” writes one commenter, “the isolation of Have Your Say allowed the rest of us to avoid the tinfoil hatters, the Provisional Wing of the Daily Mail Readership, the BNPers and the Expats who queue up to say how the country’s gone to the dogs. So of course what you do is bring them into every story! Well done!”

“Have Your Say is not perfect but it at least allowed an open forum for debate where each contributor was equal. This new format may stifle debate and will no doubt skew views in favour of the extreme minorities. I also feel it will lead to yet another dumbing down on the BBC,” writes another.

As much as may seem like a natural evolution to make everything on the Web more social and interactive, that may not be the case. The audience at a site like BBC News is so broad that commenting could become such a huge job that it ends up being impossible to manage. Popular news stories could end up with thousands of comments that end up impossible to keep track of, devaluing the point of commenting in the first place.

Perhaps the BBC News website, and other long-established news providers with vast, broad audiences, are simply better avoiding this minefield altogether.

The long-awaited international version of the BBC’s iPlayer is on track for this year and at a bargain price too, it seems.

Speaking at the FT Digital Media & Broadcasting Conference in London today, the BBC’s Director General, Mark Thompson confirmed that the video on demand service, which is free to use within the UK, will be available for a charge of “A few dollars a month – less than $10″.

While the iPlayer is available as a browser-based service and on games consoles, as well as via iPad and Android apps, in the UK, it was reported in December that the international launch could well be iPad only.

At the time, BBC.com managing director Luke Bradley-Jones said “We’re going to be adopting a pure paid subscription model for the global iPlayer for launch – in part to get audiences used to using the service, but more importantly so we can generate additional value from the service in terms of the user data that it gives us. We will also offer advertisers the chance to partner with us on the ‘free’ areas of the service.”

The men were picked up from addresses in the West Midlands, Northamptonshire, Hertfordshire, Surrey and London this morning, charged with a connection of offenses under the Computer Misuse Act.

The attacks, which were organised by an online collective called ‘Anonymous’ targetted a number of websites that withdrew their services from Wikileaks, many of them banking or payment companies including Visa, Mastercard and PayPal. The collective would use specialised software to bombard a targets server with unsolicited traffic, taking the website down as a result.

The arrests were made as part of an investigation by the Central e-Crime Unit in conjunction with authorities in Europe and the US.