The BBC has launched a site called Democracy Live. According to The Guardian the site cost £1m to launch, is funded by the BBC’s online budget and will be run by 11 permanent members of staff.

It contains videos of statements and debates, links to political programmes, information on MPS’s expenses, data on who your MP is, guides to the institutions, and blogs from people like Nick Robinson. There’s very little original content written or shot specifically for the site, apart from a couple of articles from John Bercow and Ruth Fox. I might have missed more but there’s certainly not very much.

This is a development several media (and other) organisations should be concerned about. Here’s why:

1. This is a watchdog-type site. People will be able to go in and scrutinise what their politicians are saying in a more useful format than Parliament TV. It treads on the toes of existing sites like TheyWorkForYou. What will happen to these sites that don’t have the backing of licence fees?

2. One million pounds? For what exactly? The salaries of 11 members of staff, video equipment, hosting and streaming costs, some nice speech-to-text technology. These can be expensive, but the scale of this for what is pretty much just an aggregation site surprises me. Who can afford to compete?

3. Lastly, this is a site that will appeal to bloggers and journalists – anyone in fact who wishes to investigate the goings-on of Parliament. By making itself an essential resource, a research tool if you like, the BBC is turning itself into not just a watchdog, but an archive. Potentially the BBC will control what gets investigated through controlling the archive.

It’s cementing its place in journalism and politics but at what cost?