The reason for these regulations is that the BBC can produce and offer things free at the point of use (broadly) because of an essentially forced payment. This can have problems because it puts a greater barrier in the way for competitors.
I'm not sure they got it right here but there is a valid reason for this kind of regulation.
> The British TV industry wouldn’t see an on-demand service for nearly another decade.
I'm sorry, what? There was an on demand service before this, as talked about in the article. And it absolutely didn't take until near 2019 to see others appearing.
> Netflix would’ve never stood a chance of getting its current market penetration [in the UK],” says the BBC source. “All the big players would have had the market covered for streaming video-on-demand (SVOD)
The wider context here is that ministers have been arguing that the BBC is behind the times, because Netflix-style on-demand services are the way people want to consume content now. Not only that, but an annual subscription to Netflix is cheaper than the BBC licence fee.
The BBC have responded by pointing out that government regulators killed off their attempt to work with competitors to produce such a service over a decade ago (Project Kangaroo), and now they’re being criticised by government for not being one.
I used to work at the ABC (the aussie version of BBC). We have a pretty good streaming service called iview. It started ahead of the curve, 2 years before Netflix started its streaming service.
While I wasn't there at the time, stories have been that iView faced government queries at the time for "wasting money" (and after sometime, the govt relented and funded it in 2013). This back and forth went on and on until today.
Now, of course, the stories in the media is whether or not we should impose a quota on Australian content on external streaming services. All I can do is give that Annoyed Picard reaction.
The BBC have responded by pointing out that government regulators killed off their attempt to work with competitors to produce such a service over a decade ago (Project Kangaroo), and now they’re being criticised by government for not being one.
I don't think they're being criticised by government for not being a Netflix-style VOD service. The debate is as to whether they should be funded by the licence fee with all the restrictions that come with it to allow competition in the market vs. letting them do their own thing without the licence fee. The government do appear to be coming down on the side against the licence fee, but that could just be a negotiating position, at least for the foreseeable.
No one as far as I can see is making the argument that a licence fee funded broadcaster should have taken that money and used it to launch a Netflix competitor.
They've certainly been criticised for not "attracting and retaining younger audiences" who are "increasingly turning to subscription on demand services, such as Netflix" [1] which don't need TV licenses.
Of course, a Rupert Murdoch type who wanted to shut down the BBC would argue that low viewing figures prove the injustice of forcing people to pay for a service they don't use, and therefore the justice of privatising; while high viewing figures prove the viability of the BBC as a subscription service, and therefore the viability of privatising.
Which is a crazy argument because iPlayer was ahead of the times for years before Netflix became a mainstream choice in UK households. Hell, the 2012 coverage of the London Olympics was still some of the best coverage I ever remember seeing of a sporting event.
It's a bad argument for another reason. In 2009 there was a totally different government in power. It's weird to blame politicians today for decisions made by the opposing party over a decade ago.
The BBC's problem is not iPlayer vs Netflix. It's that they aren't producing enough compelling content anymore to justify the tax that funds them. Additionally they keep angering ministers, who think they're biased and out of touch.
While I largely agree, I would attribute most of the BBC's issues down to simple budget cuts. A world-leading organisation had its funding reduced, and was eaten from the inside by those put in charge by the government.
The government has always wanted to control the state broadcaster, and a decade ago people would've fought tooth and nail to keep the BBÇ alive. The decline in quality has been slow, but obvious from all sides, from sport coverage, to factual output, and most notably from the news and political front. Those people that would've fought for the BBC years ago are now those that want its funding removed entirely, and in my opinion it's a master-class in control from the Tories. The left have been played hard by the BBC.
You're absolutely right in that it's not an iPlayer vs Netflix debate. It's an output issue, and that output has been eroded over 5-10 years.
The over 75s grant has been cut a little bit but the actual gross revenues are higher now than they used to be. Funding isn't the BBCs problem. It is able to tax a growing population - that's the definition of increasing revenues. With billions of pounds to splash around it's really hard for them to plead poverty.
The bigger issue is they produce a lot of content but it's increasingly narrowly targeted to, basically, the sort of thing Lib Dem voters in London like (and think other people should like). That's a small minority of the population.
I think this needs to be considered in more detail, because those numbers are different than the accounts published by the BBC, and one of the ways there were cuts was having more things added to the responsibilities. For example, the BBC wasn't paying £75M/year for S4C before, but it is now.
I'm also not quite sure on the over 75s licenses being marked as "cut a little bit"
> The compensation paid to the BBC by government for the current 4.55 million free TV licences (introduced in 2000) is being phased out in three steps – falling from £655m in 2017-18 to £468m in 2018-19 and a final £247m payment in 2019-20. At that point, the value of the free licences could be £725m.
That's huge drop unless those numbers have changed, but even the plan of charging some for the license put the figure at near £250M. Combined with the S4C change that's, what, over 10% of your figure as a cut without converting to real terms.
Alright. I didn't know about S4C. I agree that moving things around between different budgets can result in what feels like 'cuts' to the BBC although, normally departments don't consider enlargement to be a cut exactly :)
I had a bit of a rant on HN the other day about this practice in the UK of describing the public sector as being 'cut' when graphs of their budget are going up and to the right. People do it a lot with the NHS and it distorts the political debate, in my mind, because of course people hear the word "cut" and think the amount of available money is going down when it's actually going up.
The loss of the money for the over-75s is a real cut. But so far it hasn't counter-balanced the increase in revenue from general population growth, or at least that's how I interpret the graphs on the page I linked to, which are going up and to the right. Additionally the BBC spends considerably more than it gets in license fee, I assume that's based on commercial revenues as (AFAIK) the BBC doesn't take out loans or get into debt. When those revenues are also considered its expenditure has been growing steadily since 2011.
Tony Hall's argument is basically that Amazon/Netflix can outspend them. Well yeah, but Netflix is a temporary phenomenon given their enormous burn rates and the spending of Amazon/Apple is somewhat calibrated towards matching it. I'm not convinced those levels of spending on content will last forever, myself. But also the BBC is allowed to sell its programs internationally, just like Netflix and Amazon do. It generates significant revenues from that as the graphs show. What stops them competing with these firms, exactly? They play in the same league.
Part of the justification the BBC gives for its existence is that it does not have to simply duplicate what commercial providers do. It feels like they try to argue both sides of the issue: the license fee is good because it frees them from the need to do populist stuff and lets them focus on worthy but expensive programming like documentaries and news, but it's also bad because it means they can't compete (anymore) with commercial outlets on producing populist dramas.
Rather than demand more money, maybe they should consider their focus. Apple/Amazon/Netflix don't attempt to fund worldwide journalism or radio. If the BBC is finding itself faced with better competitors, perhaps it should re-allocate resources towards the stuff it does that's unique.
I'm on a phone so I'll try and respond more in depth later but the total income based on the yearly accounts was £4993M in year end 2011, and £4889M in year end 2019. That's not adjusting for anything, just total income.
> because Netflix-style on-demand services are the way people want to consume content now
Is it? I have been exposed a bit to Netflix and the content is a lot of filler with the occasional interesting movie. But not nearly enough value for what it costs in my opinion, and with the very limited programming it would become boring quickly.
> because Netflix-style on-demand services are the way people want to consume content now
> Is it? I have been exposed a bit to Netflix and the content is a lot of filler with the occasional interesting movie.
The comment you quote says "the way people want to consume", but your comment is about the content itself.
I think most people want the on-demand style, but of course everyone also wants there to be good content. Content being equal, do you think on-demand content is not the way most people would want to consume it?
When several people are potentially watching it can take a long time to reach consensus. Even by myself I've scrolled Netflix for 15 minutes and then turned it off, because I can't agree what I want to watch...
In contrast, channels have content in sync with the rhythm of the day and the hour. You only have to choose the channel. I wish I could flick through channel streams at the speed I can flick through broadcast channels.
I understand the point, but whether it actually is the way people want to consume content or not is irrelevant — that is the accusation being levelled at the BBC, and specifically that they risk being “Blockbuster in the age of Netflix”.
Does that mean you're repeating The Guardian's talking points?
Or is it possible that a person might hold views that overlap with those perceived also to be put forward by media organisations?
The BBC's success risks suffocating commercial media. Put too many restrictions on the BBC and the risk is of suffocating the BBC. It seems reasonable to me that the government should attempt to find a balance. And, being a government staffed by humans, they make the wrong call sometimes.
Yeah, local radio in the UK is mostly rubbish. BBC and commercial.
Commercial local radio has been freed of most of the licensing stipulations that required distinctive local programming or specific types of programming. That is a shame but it doesn't follow that all commercial media has to be rubbish.
On balance, I think the BBC has been a good thing for the UK. However, it's undeniable that the BBC's presence has made it harder for commercial providers to flourish.
> The reason for these regulations is that the BBC can produce and offer things free at the point of use
But this wouldn't have been "free":
As the director of technology and new media at the BBC, Highfield had just overseen the launch of the iPlayer – BBC's online catch-up service. Now he wanted to try and build a commercial equivalent that would earn more.
You'd have paid for the service on top of, the now included with license fee, broadcast/iPlayer.
Now sure the BBC may have had some advantage over nascent offerings at the time (2007), but let's face these realistically didn't exist in the UK. What we have now is the market controlled by two US companies (and Sky to an extent) that exploit tax loopholes and don't treat their employee's terribly well (certainly in the case of Amazon).
Yes, but the regulations are best explained using free as the example because for a significant amount of the work they are not legally allowed to charge or (e.g.) show adverts. The practical reality is that you can replace "free" with "below cost". Unless this was funded entirely from worldwide, it would be using a source of funding not available to others.
> Now sure the BBC may have had some advantage over nascent offerings at the time (2007), but let's face these realistically didn't exist in the UK
Yes, which is again kind of the point - there was a space for offerings to come in and compete against each other. The ruling was that Kangaroo would likely stop this competition, including stopping competition between the BBC/ITV/C4. There was still a fight to get YouView past the competition stage (canvas back when I worked on the apps, AS2 & constrained video memory was... interesting).
You must have a license to watch broadcast TV or use the BBC iPlayer (the online BBC-only streaming service). If you only use your TV(s) with a games console, to watch recorded content or streaming content over the Internet, you don't need to pay it. You are not required to provide access to an inspector from TV Licensing to confirm that your TV isn't hooked up to an aerial or satellite box, but it makes life easier if you do.
The license fee costs £154.50 a year, or £52 if you only have a black and white TV (lord knows how given we're now 100% digital), but the government pays it for you if you're over 75 years of age.
This produces an income of ~£3.5 billion a year, and broadly breaks down into 55% spent on TV broadcasting, 17% radio broadcasting, 10% for the BBC World Service and the rest of it goes on the website, various apps, collecting the fee itself and the transmitter network across the country used by all terrestrial broadcasters, not just the BBC. It also pays slabs of cash into the EBU who produce the Eurovision Song Contest, amongst other things...
This results in nine national TV channels, 10 UK-wide radio stations, six national (i.e. England, Wales, Scotland, NI only), and 40 local radio stations. The BBC website, iPlayer, apps in the App Stores, etc. are all paid for through this as well. If you're outside the UK you will see adverts as it can't subsidise access for non-UK citizens, but inside the UK all this content is 100% free of all advertising other than to cross-promote BBC content.
In recent months the Government have suggested that it's an unfair burden. There are two sides to this truth:
1. Most magistrate courts seem to spend a significant amount of their time dealing with non-payers, and there are people in prison for non-payment. IIRC, it's the most common crime committed by incarcerated women in the UK. For context, it's worth noting that the incarceration rate in the UK is about 1/5th of the USA's so the actual number is still quite low, but still...
2. Most people think scrapping it is a political move, because there are weird power dynamics between Downing Street, the execs in charge of BBC News and the rest of the BBC who seem to have problems with the News division and their friendliness with Downing Street and the PM in particular.
As a result, I think most people would prefer that the license was cheaper, the penalty for non-payment could not include prison and that we keep it.
I wish the UK would just scrap it as an independent license, and just include it as part of the government budget.
Like Norway did last year. Now they have it as part of your income tax. [1] This will save a lot of expenses in informing, collecting, organising, prosecuting etc.
I know that means everyone pays even though you don't own a TV, but that is fine by me. You pay taxes if you don't use every road, hospital, school, opera house as well.
(Note, their license fee was about £300 per year last year.)
Scrapping the BBC license fee and not fund it the same via a budget, but instead, a subscription-only will be awful. It will then join the other commercial channels which is 99% reality TV and gameshows.
> I wish the UK would just scrap it as an independent license, and just include it as part of the government budget.
This would mean the funding of the BBC would be under direct control of the ruling government, which creates a conflict of interest (no positive coverage -> no money next year).
> Like Norway did last year. Now they have it as part of your income tax.
Norway TV isn't funded by government budget, they just streamlined the calculation and payment process into your income tax procedure.
The budget is still dedicated to TV licensing and owned by the broadcaster.
That's a big big BIG difference.
In one case only the financial process is optimized, in the other case you turn the broadcaster into a "national propaganda station".
As a citizen, keep an eye on this distinction on every proposal that is made, and speak up against every step the government takes to gain more control over the budget.
The idea of arms length funding doesn't make sense. The conflict of interest already exists. The government can and does control the license fee, hence the recent kerfuffle about decriminalisation (many more people just won't pay if there's no consequence to not doing so). Ultimately the BBC is funded by government mandate. What government giveth, government can take away.
Additionally, the BBC has lost the argument that the license fee makes it neutral and independent to the betterment of all. More than half of the British population perceive it as being untrustworthy and biased (in favour of London metro media studies grad type viewpoints). This phenomenon is especially strong amongst the kinds of people who voted Tory for the first time and gave Boris his big majority, so their views are seen as very important.
YouGov figures show British trust in the press to tell the truth has fallen, with less than half believing BBC news journalists are honest and impartial.
The loss of BBC market share to other services is being raised as a justification for attacking the license fee here, but the ground is filled with kindling. Both the Tories and Labour see the BBC as ideologically opposed to them now.
IMO, it's even better to be in the government budget, because those who can't afford the TV license probably already don't end up paying much taxes in the first place, putting more of the burden for the TV on the people who can afford it, instead of the people who use it.
Normally I'd say that's a little backwards, but the BBC is definitely a culture and education thing, and that firmly belongs in the "benefits everyone" category, IMO.
> but the BBC is definitely a culture and education thing
Before the the dawn of the internet, sure. Now not so much, I would say it is more of a political tool that sometimes produces some low quality educational content.
'You pay taxes if you don't use every road, hospital, school, opera house as well'. Yes but that's not by itself an argument to bung even more services, used or not, into the mix.
You can vote for people who set the budget. If the issue (let's say defunding a local opera house you don't attend) is important enough, you can form a voting bloc and get your way. You might need to spend some time and money on raising awareness among local voters. And you will definitely face some opposition, but it's doable.
> but you rely on a society that educates children, as employees, as people making goods, providing services etc
The whole "educating people in order to become good wageslaves" thing, yes. Anyway, these that directly benefit from their education (their parents? the companies that they will work on?) could as well fund their education. Using my hard earned money however to inefficiently fund some low-quality education for someone else's child (who might not even be interested in it) under the threat of violence when I did not have the same luck as them is at the very least unfair.
> You want to live in a civilised society, you pay the membership club. You want to live in your Randian distopia, go and make one.
Ah yes, the native Americans in the trail of tears were also expelled in the name of civilization. Don't you think it is time to stop expelling people from the clay that they were born on in order to bring an abstract concept such as "civilization" (as defined by you ofc) to the lands?
Also, I love it how you focused on the most sensationalist part of the story, that is, the education of the children. But failed to mention how everyone being forced to fund -for example- opera houses from their labour is an integral part of society. Or how when the UK joined the war against iraq under false pretences and their taxes were funding war crimes helped our civilization prosper - "You want to live in a civilised society, you pay the membership club", including war crimes.
Honestly, it feels like the entire argument is basically "pay your taxes even if it funds things you don't like, because those are things I like". BBC these days with the rise of the internet only benefits the few who watch TV, forcing everyone to fund it is basically thief.
There are many things which I disagree with in this comment and some things that I don't think are relevant at all, but the statement that "[sic: The] BBC these days with the rise of the internet only benefits the few who watch TV, forcing everyone to fund it is basically thief" is particularly problematic.
The BBC does a lot more than just produce content for TV broadcast. BBC News, BBC Weather, BBC Sport, Bitesize (online educational resources), all of the radio stations.
A similar argument can be applied there. They could adopt an online subscription model like other similar companies (NYTimes, etc) did, or they could have ads or whatever. There is no reason to have every taxpayer pay for something that they do not need.
So let me correct what I said: "BBC only benefits the few who use its services".
> There are many things which I disagree with in this comment and some things that I don't think are relevant at all
Out of interest, do you yourself live in the UK? I suspect you don't from the way you've written your comment, but I do genuinely think you might have a different opinion if you consumed its output in the same way as the vast majority of people do.
I will address your post and your question once you address mine. It is rude to ask others questions if you are not willing to reply to the questions that they ask you. (That being said, I will assume in good faith that you simply forgot about it, which happens sometimes)
> > There are many things which I disagree with in this comment and some things that I don't think are relevant at all
I think it's already clear I disagree with your premise that the BBC is only useful to an insignificant number of tax payers and that such taxation is therefore "theft".
I also disagree that the only use of this money is to "inefficiently fund some low-quality education for someone else's child". I think an educated populace is in everyone's interests. There are obvious public health benefits, for a start.
In terms of parts of your comments I consider irrelevant: in your later comment, the reference to the NYT (I explained why earlier), and the earlier reference to e.g. the Iraq war - although I can see what you're trying to get at with this point (civilisations doing questionable things, therefore the idea of doing things "for the good of civilisation" being something of a fallacy) I find it difficult to understand the relevance when we're considering a public broadcaster.
> civilisations doing questionable things, therefore the idea of doing things "for the good of civilisation" being something of a fallacy
Ah, I should clarify (although while you are not wrong, this was indeed part of the point), it was mostly a reference to "pay the membership club" - that taxes, the "membership fee" for civilization was used to do uncivilized things.
> The BBC has 81%
I certainly was not aware that BBC had such reach. I guess it has to do with the people that I associate with. It was indeed incorrect to say "the few" then.
Never let a TV license inspector into your house, do not talk to them and never sign anything they ask you to sign. Simply say no thanks and close the door. No matter if you think you have nothing to hide. Do not communicate with them at all. All prosecutions are based on people signing "confessions" after letting inspector into their house. Non-communication is the best approach when you genuinely do not need a license.
It's good that you enjoy the BBC's content, I'm aware that many do.
One may love BBC's programmes, or one may not hate them — that is irrelevant. If you watch any TV at all then legally you must buy a license.
The issue is whether you and I should be compelled by government, under threat of criminal prosecution, to pay for the BBC whether we consume its content or not. (As you know even watching commercial TV requires a BBC license, and it is a source of stress for the legally license free to ensure that one does not accidentally infringe when legally using a TV for other purposes.)
My comment was just practical advice for for all those who legally choose not to purchase a TV license yet remain pursued by the BBC with their threatening letters, cards through the door, inspectors etc.
They only stop for 2 years and then you have to fill in the form again like a good little boy. That's not the end of the world. The BBC says jump we say how high — fine. But the presumption of criminality (you have read the letters they send, right?) and the fact that you have to proactively contact an organisation on a regular basis to make an agreement with them that you DON'T want to be a customer of theirs, just to avoid being harrased and accused on a monthly basis, is absurd.
They don't go to prison for not having a TV licence. They are fined (I believe incarceration is an option but the courts apply a modicum of common sense in this regard).
However, some people still don't pay and ultimately end up in prison for non-payment of the fine.
There has to be a sanction for non-payment of fines though. I think the proposal to change the status from criminal to civil is very sensible however. The worst that can happen then is you have a judgement against your name for 6 years.
You don't need a license to own a TV that's right, but damn if you accidentally tune it to ITV4 for 5 seconds while hooking up the DVD player, or if you click on a BBC News (or Sky news for that matter) live stream on the web in your unlicensed house, you are a criminal right there. Literalty that is a criminal offence. Is that proportionate?
Surely that would require you to accidentally connect it to an aerial or satellite dish and then accidentality select the tuning option on your TV.
Given that we no longer have analogue broadcasts and you're unlikely to pick up a fuzzy signal with a HDMI cable you might as well just "accidentally" bittorrent the thing you want to watch in 4K and have done with it.
"Yes your Honour I did just happen to accidentally watch 3 weeks of Tour de France highlights on ITV4 at 7.00pm each night whilst connecting up my DVD player"
...frankly, there are more believable vacuum cleaner "accidents" reported in A&E on a Saturday night. :P
OK I get it. How about a slightly more beleivable scenario: your license elapses and you choose not to renew. You didn't disconnect the aerial yet. You switch on the TV to watch a DVD, it tunes automatically to the last channel. Oops now you're a criminal.
Or even more realistically, read some of the news articles about how most TV license convictions are women with low incomes who got bullied by the enforcers who came to the door into signing a confession that yes they did watch the TV for a week after the license ran out.
It used to be everyone paid a TV license if they watched TV.
Then about 20 years ago the government offered a bribe to over 75s and said "we'll pay your tv license". This is basically was basically giving an extra £200 (in 2019 money) a year to every household with an over 75.
This cost something like £750m a year - something like 20% of the BBC budget (a budget that has dropped 25% in the last 10 years)
Then the government said "we don't need to bribe old people any more because brexit", and removed that subsidy. However they then said "The BBC will pay it", and old people lapped it up and blamed the BBC
The BBC then said "ok, we will pay for over 75s who have low income, but we won't pay for a license for millionaires who are living off final salary pensions". This was apparently still outrageous.
In parallel to this, the "left" of the country are rather annoyed by the BBC for their perceived bias towards the government and brexit, and thus they are saying "it's time to turn off the BBC"
There is, and always has been, a fundamental unfairness in the license fee. Someone living on their own on minimum wage pays the same as a family of 5 on £500k a year.
Worth noting that today it's easier than ever not to have a license fee, simply use the internet, subscribe to now TV for whatever junk is on sky. There are very few people consume no BBC services and only watch ITV.
> In parallel to this, the "left" of the country are rather annoyed by the BBC for their perceived bias towards the government and brexit, and thus they are saying "it's time to turn off the BBC"
It's the right that are currently advocating for the removal of the license fee and therefore de facto, the end of the BBC
The loudest defenders seem to be backbench Tory MPs! The BBC is a true conservative institution, but the shamble in government aren't true conservatives
The "left", certainly the "remain" left, are publically saying the BBC should be shut down because of Question Time alone.
> You are not required to provide access to an inspector from TV Licensing to confirm that your TV isn't hooked up to an aerial or satellite box, but it makes life easier if you do.
They have a TV license inspector ? Who actually enters your house to inspect ? What happens if you are found watching Doctor Who without her highness' permission ?
> but the government pays it for you if you're over 75 years of age.
What do you mean by government pays it for you ? You mean the BBC tax is waived off if you are too old. (That way I think the Queen and half of her family does not need license).
> and there are people in prison for non-payment.
Sorry for the first question.
This whole system is incredibly stupid. BBC has like this free revenue stream backed up by coercive power of the government. (Imagine Netflix could send people to jail for sharing their subscription or torrenting their shows).
Surely it would make more sense just to fund the BBC through general taxation. The cost of the license fee is set by legislation anyway, so it's not as if the license fee model gives the BBC any additional independence.
Another key tenet is the universality of the fee. Everyone pays the same rate regardless of background, so there should be no preference/bias to creating content for a wealthier demographic that may pay a greater proportion of the fee.
The funding is equally shouldered across the population, so the content should be created with equal consideration too. In practice doesn't always go that way, but that was the principle.
I don’t think that makes sense. If everyone pays the same, most funding will come from the least wealthy, as there are more of them. Making the wealthy pay more would keep funding sources more equal.
The funding isn't controlled by the government but it may aswell be given how the BBC board is selected and their approval of the non-executives and the director of the BBC. The Queen (i.e. Ministers on her behalf) appoints all of them.
Those appointed from outside the BBC tend not to have any background in NGO or non-profits. Bit strange for a not for profit public broadcaster.
It's a very hairy arrangement and I don't think most of the public are aware of it.
In Germany, they tried for years to get people who own receivers (TVs, radios, internet-connected devices) to pay a fee for public media. They eventually gave up trying to identify who has a receiver and now just charge everyone who lives in the country.
> 2. Most people think scrapping it is a political move, because there are weird power dynamics between Downing Street, the execs in charge of BBC News and the rest of the BBC who seem to have problems with the News division and their friendliness with Downing Street and the PM in particular.
The context here is that the BBC is legally bound to be politically neutral. The problem is that in this modern partisan environment both sides think the BBC is horrendously biased. Tory's think it's full of left wing Londoners (not entirely untrue) and Labour think it's full of upper-middle class private school kids (again not entirely untrue).
With the current political divide no one can agree what politically neutral means and criticising the BBC is an easy politic win, as it's easy to 'other'.
Previously BBC was viewed in a similar way to the NHS, a British institution and one of our greatest exports as a country. Trying to shut it down or limit it was politically dangerous. Nowadays less folk are fussed,either they agree it's biased or they're like me and haven't watched it (bar Christmas trips home) since leaving home.
Problem is not that BBC is biased, but doing horrible job and divides society.
During brexit referendum it would be very easy to debunk exiter's arguments (£350 million a week for the NHS etc). BBC instead called people racist, supremacist and priviliged. People voted for brexit just to spite BBC.
If they did vote for it just to spite the BBC, it was at least partially off the back of the BBC giving a huge amount of time to those nonsense arguments.
>The license fee costs £154.50 a year, or £52 if you only have a black and white TV (lord knows how given we're now 100% digital), but the government pays it for you if you're over 75 years of age.
The government stopped paying for it years ago, and forced the BBC to give out free licenses in order to hurt the BBC.
To be fair, over 75s are one of the richest groups in the UK collectively. The government's argument then was not about hurting the BBC but about better targeting limited taxpayers money towards those who actually needed it, in the context of significant cuts being made to public expenditure more generally.
You could argue that not increasing the licence fee to offset the loss of income was about hurting the BBC I suppose though the government side of that argument would have been about not increasing the burden on the less well off who are forced to pay the fee if they want to watch TV.
I have a TV without a TV licence, but here is how not joined up the TV licence IT department is.
I sent away to get a refund for my TV licence as I only had it part of the year, I filled in the form as to why I no longer require a TV licence. The TV Licence people agreed and sent me my refund.
Next week I start getting the threatning letters that I have no TV licence... I've been getting these threatning letters ever since at the start of every month. Idiots.
It's not because they're not joined up. It's a deliberate policy to write to every household in the entire country which doesn't have a licence (for whatever reason - this includes empty houses, for example) like this. There's no point in responding to them because they won't stop writing to you.
In the same way, is paying for a Netflix account a licence then? No Netflix subscription, no Netflix for you? Or how about your rent, is that a licence, too? Because if you stop paying your rent, you can't live there any more.
You can watch TV without a TV licence, just not the BBC. Just like how you can watch TV without a Netflix subscription, just not Netflix. It's equivalent to buying a ticket for a film as another example. It's not permitted to watch a film at the cinema without a ticket. It's a permit to watch the film.
You can't watch a ITV without a license, unless you watch it on whatever ITV's iplayer equivelent it. Same with Sky, you can subscribe to nowtv, but you can't watch sky in a legacy OTA way.
> Just like how you can watch TV without a Netflix subscription, just not Netflix.
This is incorrect. You cannot watch or record broadcast TV of any sort without a TV license. That includes any channels on freeview (funded by ad-breaks) or any live TV from another service e.g. watch live TV through the internet (even on services that aren't the iPlayer).
From the TV licensing website:
> Live TV means any programme you watch or record as it’s being shown on TV or live on any online TV service. It’s not just live events like sport, news and music. It covers all programmes on any channel, including soaps, series, documentaries and even movies.
> It's equivalent to buying a ticket for a film as another example.
No it isn't. You have no choice in the matter. When I paid for the TV license I never watched the BBC's content but I still had to pay for the BBC's content.
e.g. If I were to pay for Sky TV I would still need to pay a TV license. I cannot opt out of paying the BBC. The only way to not pay the BBC is to use only online services or only use your TV for consoles / bluray / dvd.
Because that would undermine the entire point of the BBC:
to act in the public interest, serving all audiences through the provision of impartial, high-quality and distinctive output and services which inform, educate and entertain
This. So many of the arguments about the license fee seem to miss the point - the BBC isn't a commercial broadcaster. Impartiality and 'public service' as fundamental tenets that drive output would disappear if they had to chase subscriptions.
British Telecom was trialing on-demand video deployments in the 80s.
No internet, instead it used fibre optic cable to create a switched video network, which could be used to watch normal cable tv channels, or connect the user to a dedicated remote laserdisc player.
While such systems never got wide-spread deployments, it's interesting to consider how the media landscape would have changed if we had gone that route.
BBC research are amazing. They've been doing this for decades, most recently with next gen codecs and latency issues on internet transmission. As a British person I'm actually proud of them, even though many people complain their politics are orthogonal to mine.
Maybe. Nobody uses the BBC codecs because they aren't really next gen. They're alright, but the industry has agreed on many-vendor international consortiums to develop codecs, and their outputs are always the best codecs available. Those are the ones that get turned into hardware acceleration chips which you need these days to be adopted and competitive.
It's not really clear why the BBC spends money on duplicating this research instead of contributing its ideas to HEVC, AVC etc like everyone else does. Easy to argue that's a waste of tax money. (I'm also British).
This is a very fascinating discussion. NRK, the Norwegian national broadcaster also does this. NRK Beta, which experiments with new technology in broadcasting, launched a streaming service in 2007, which was the basis for the streaming offering they are still providing today.
It's worth mentioning that NRK and Norway has taken inspiration from BBC since the dawn of television, including the licensing system (which has just been replaced by a fixed tax).
We have a few institutions that are close to being considered legendary across the planet: NHS and BBC spring to mind. Neither of those two are perfect but they are both ground breaking and a bit subversive.
I doubt anyone not from these shores (UK) would ever peg the UKoGB as a hot bed of left wing leaning types. Our stereotype abroad is pretty fixed and pretty obvious () and also encouraged by us: tourism is a bloody good earner.
We (people in the UK) now find ourselves as rabid defenders of a left wing dream, despite our political leanings. You know why as well as I do, that we love our NHS. If I want to, I can wander into a hospital ER and will be seen to, without any discussion of money. When someone needs medical assistance, metal discs or bits of paper should not be involved - they are merely pretty things and not useful.
() I should point out here that the "British Scientists" meme in Russia (int al) is one we are aware of, and also laugh at and with. There are loads more: and we still laugh with you, because we love you.
Regarding the NHS: what do you base that global legendary status on? I don't have any data, myself, but I would say its status probably applies to the anglosphere (as legendary) and probably only as middling (as compared to other European countries')
That's the thing about the Anglosphere: no other countries exist. The healthcare debate is only ever between the UK option and the US option. We all know that moving the UK system towards the US would be a disaster, and yet that's the only option on the menu.
How on earth could the UK media report on the French healthcare system? It's in French! /s
Yeah it's really weird, anyone who has used the health system in France, Switzerland, Belgium or many others would never praise the NHS. Don't get me wrong, it's a decent healthcare system that runs on very little money, but it's no way near the best
Very little money? It uses 9,7% of UK's GDP. It's only a very little money if compared to US system.
In comparison, Polish healthcare expenditure is 6,5%. It's obviously worse than NHS, but it's miraculous that it works that well - with only 3 years expected lifespan below UK and 1 below US.
My neighbours, who are from Germany, have praised the simplicity of the financial side of the NHS compared to the German system. I was quite surprised by this!
Probably in value for money it's the best. It's also an institution that has yet to be destroyed by capitalism, in that many people working in the NHS do so because it's a vocation and make large personal sacrifices to make it work.
It’s a noble thing to follow a vocation without being driven entirely by self interest.
In contrast, once market forces were unleashed in academia, good will built over decades was lost and a lot of great people quit. Very hard to get that good will and sense of vocation back.
Not everything in life has been to be run by markets driven by self interest. Some things do better without them.
And random internet guy says: “It's seemingly a direct replacement of the Soviet-era ‘Armenian radio reported’ type of joke. [It] gained more notability in 2006 following the British reports of the polonium poisoning of Litvinenko.“
Pretty good chance. They triage, and if you're not an emergency and you're easy to treat they like to get you seen and out of the department because it helps their 4 hour targets.
On similar lines, I heard that DSL development was largely funded by the telcos because they wanted to get some of that sweet cableTV subscription money; with broadband internet being largely an afterthought...
In the early 90s, it's how it would of had to work.
By the late 90s, it would be cheaper and much lower maintenance to replace the robot laserdisc library and banks of players with a large array of HDDs and a hardware MPEG 1/2 decoder chip per viewer.
Yeah if you didn't mind waiting 30 minutes to an hour to start watching.
Sky Box Office just used spare bandwidth to continuously broadcast the same film on different channels with a time offset. That's why then only had a selection of about 3-5 films at any one time.
That was still a useful service but not the same as real video on demand.
Historically, one of the benefits of a licensepayer-funded national broadcaster in the BBC was that it served as a nexus for investment in media distribution infrastructure and standards. The BBC played a leading role in the definition of TV transmission standards, including advances like color, teletext, closed captioning, digital audio, and digital video; In the digital era they have helped to develop video compression and codec technology, in particular trying to ensure that there are unencumbered royalty-free options for video processing.
In the light of that it would seem natural for the BBC to be involved in developing a standard, equal access streaming platform for content distribution in the internet era - in exactly the same way as their transmission investments helped to bootstrap independent broadcasting, BBC investment in streaming would have smoothed the road for independent content producers to follow.
The particular tragedy is that, for its time, iPlayer was a phenomenally well engineered product - the BBC had done the work to deliver a scalable, user friendly streaming platform, before anybody else had really done so. Taking that platform that had been built with licensepayer money and using it to create a platform that let commercial players deliver content to UK consumers would have created a very different media market and set an alternative shape for how streaming services might work - and yes, it might have obviated the need for Netflix in the UK, but it would have opened up the UK media market to the likes of HBO, Disney, the NFL, and so on in ways that would have profoundly changed the media landscape.
Internally, the BBC have a private streaming platform, [that used to be] called 'Redux' where 90%+ of their entire back catalogue is available for staff and journos to watch and search, as it's all fully indexed with thumbnails, and complete scripts. The UI is something out of the 90s but it works and is used all the time.
Redux is very good at it's job, but it's very much not built as a public streaming platform and doesn't do a lot of real world things you'd need such a platform to do.
This article is weird: the tone it sets is that them being blocked was a bad thing but then they say:
> Netflix would’ve never stood a chance of getting its current market penetration [in the UK],” says the BBC source. “All the big players would have had the market covered for streaming video-on-demand (SVOD)
That's exactly why they blocked it: to allow for multiple individual competitors to enter the market. So... the regulators did a good job after all: by blocking the huge merging of content from three of the biggest providers in the UK.
Don't confuse the article having an ideology for it being wrong. State-operated streaming services have had success in other countries without monopolistic problems.
Take, for example, Denmark where, in addition to hosting a streaming service, multiple state TV-channels have gone online-only. On top of this, public libraries themselves have their own free streaming services.
> Digital was considered the “weird sibling” of television and radio before the internet content boom, and commissioners in traditional broadcast were worried digital services would cannibalise their audiences.
I spent some time working for a similar organization. And even in 2020, the same attitudes prevails. I've literally seen radio personalities and producers admit the audience is declining, but ask why we can't just milk the boomer audience until they all die off in 30 years time.
These organisations are filled with people who only understand one way to do things, and are incredibly hostile to change. The people on the ground resist any big strategic shifts from management, and use their union powers to fight back.
The article seems to imply that if BBC launched its own video streaming service when Netflix was still sending DVDs, it would've become the next Netflix.
I have to disagree. The execution is what really matters, not the idea.
- Could BBC have hired the talent to build and scale a credible competitor?
- Could BBC have popularized the model of on-demand, subscription based TV?
- Could BBC have acquired and created content people want to watch?
If the answer to these questions is yes (and the regulations in question aren't a problem), I would highly encourage BBC to launch a video streaming service today!
The first two, yes. The BBC have a long history of being a place UK techies want to work at, and they're already subscription-based, more or less. But they never in a million years could have created the breadth of content Netflix created, even if they were rolling in money. They would have made BBC stuff but with higher production values.
The challenge isn't building a website that can stream video. The challenge is streaming 15% (I think it used to be even higher) of total internet traffic, which is what Netflix does. iPlayer shows the ability to do the former, not the latter.
This isn't to say that BBC couldn't have pulled it off, just that iPlayer isn't evidence that they would have.
iPlayer streams about 350 million shows a month. It accounts for a fair bit more than 15% of UK internet traffic and is more popular than Netflix within the UK. I know former staff who have disclosed privately some of the traffic numbers to me - they have the capability to do this sort of traffic, yes.
Whilst certainly not at Netflix scale, the BBC do have their own decentralised caching infrastructure called BIDI [1] that is frequently deployed inside large UK ISPs. This is similar to Netflix's OCA, Google's GGc or Facebook's FNA.
At one point, BBC iPlayer was building a MSN plugin so that you could talk to your friends whilst you watched TV programs, this is 10 years ago though.
Channel 4 was first by a considerable margin. I remember using 4OD back in 2006/07, it was great.
Iirc, IPlayer existed but it was very limited in what it showed. It took them years to move off a 7-day window (as the article explains, there was massive hostility to streaming within the BBC). 4OD had rights issues but, iirc, they made full series available from day one.
ITV was shit though (and still is)...although that is partly a function of the weird corporate structure.
Also, Project Kangaroo was far more complicated than the article says. By the time that the parties had stopped arguing and BBC had got over their hostility to streaming, Netflix was already going and paying the BBC for stuff that was going to be in Kangaroo. The reason this is coming out now is the BBC lobbyists are going on the attack but this would have changed nothing.
In fact, all it would have meant is that you pay for more streaming services, and one of them would be very shit largely consisting of old episodes of Dad's Army...you can already get the best parts of the back catalogue on Netflix (the BBC should be offering this to licence-payers for free...but this wasn't what Kangaroo was either, it was a money spinner so the Islington boys could fleece licence-payers a second time...Netflix helps them, it isn't competition).
> Channel 4 was first by a considerable margin. I remember using 4OD back in 2006/07, it was great.
Channel 4 launched about six weeks before iPlayer in the end, but only because the BBC launch was held up by the regulator. It was ready (ish) about six months earlier.
4OD had the seven day window at launch, it didn't launch any box sets until about 2009, and it had lots of rights issues too. Indeed, they forgot to rights clear any of the advertising and had to blank all the commercial breaks with dead air on the online simulcast for the first week...
I do agree that Kangaroo was a bit more complex than portrayed here, but your statement that the BBC are "fleecing" the public by trying to commercially fund the release of older material that is virtually never fully BBC owned and requires the payment of hefty royalties is false.
Right, and what were 4OD's views? From what I remember, far fewer people used IPlayer until they moved to 30-day...which was 2014-ish.
And your timeline isn't correct, as said I remember using it in 2007 which was before IPlayer launched (you can actually verify this for yourself if you Google, IPlayer launched Christmas Day 07...4OD launched over a year earlier).
And 4OD opened back catalogue on launch. That is just factually incorrect too (again, if you deigned to do some Googling you could find this out for yourself).
I also didn't say that was the fleece. Kangaroo was the fleece. But the fleece is also selling stuff to Netflix that people have already paid for...saying this is "false" is odd (do you work on the BBC's "fact-checking" service by any chance? They have a habit of not understanding the difference between true and false).
Royalties make no difference, that is just economically incontinent...if I develop an oil field and I pay $10/barrel in royalties, it doesn't matter because I am making $50/barrel, and that is tied to my revenue. It makes zero difference. If royalties are prohibitive, don't develop it.
...amazing that you managed to compose a post that was almost entirely fiction but stated with utter authority. Why do you think you did this?
Because BBC (and by proxy the ones that control it) want to have the last word on news and culture. What used to be a center left organization is now teeming with many in the far left, blatantly allied with the labor party [1].
Turning state funded media into a partisan propaganda agency typically doesn't end well in a democracy.
First off, a journalist/news channel doesn't/shouldn't only hear from voices that affirm biases, especially state funded ones - in this case, it's healthy for the BBC to hear opposing views taken by their editorial staff.
Secondly, de-platforming shouldn't be there normal. Your phrasing is indicative of a trend towards decimation of speech in western civilization. Your labels of "extreme right" are unsubstantiated and expectations of default deplatforming of anything right of "far left", dangerous to discourse.
For the unfamiliar, here [1] is a recent example of the alleged "platforming" done by BBC QT as alleged by the op. These days, it's gotten all too common to label opposing opinions with extremely inaccurate strawman-able distasteful labels, just to censor them.
I don't think it's left/right bias - now leave/remain bias is something I can definitely see the BBC having. As a government institution they naturally favour the status quo.
Worth noting here is that Swedish public broadcasting SVT have had an online streaming service since 2006. Even though Sweden is also a pretty regulated socialist democracy in most people's eyes.
Because every time I see one of these headlines on a site full of VC entrepreneurs I take it as an attack on government regulation.
Government should regulate business, there's nothing bad about that. G20 is about to discuss massive government regulation of business to get back lost tax revenue.
If this ever was true (and I guess it was at the beginning if you counted YC as a VC back then), it's certainly not anymore.
YC-funded company founders are a tiny minority of participants here these days, and founders of other VC-backed companies barely register as a presence at all.
It is amazing to watch this story get rewritten in the media by the BBC lobbyists.
Kangaroo was never a standalone streaming service. All the parties had streaming services already. BBC were the only ones who planned to offer current content on the platform, and even then it was a link to their own streaming service. The main purpose of this was to sell the back catalogue.
So, no wonder this didn't occur. This project was talked about for years, it never really got started. And the BBC then realised that they could just sell you the programs you paid to develop through Netflix. Revenue in content sales is going through the roof, all that is going into the pockets of staff...why bother creating something new? It is a total scam.
The stuff about the Competition Commission is quite correct though. They made a series of bogus decisions around this time (Pure Gym/Gym Group being another one) where they chose some odd definition of market size. As with most other British institutions, including the BBC, it is run by the academic/lobbyist/civil servant...lots of board seats, no experience of business beyond lobbying for subsidies, quite remarkable.
I can draw a flying car with lasers attached to it, doesn't mean it would actually happen. And if someone built the flying laser car later, I can't take credit for it just because I doodled it on a napkin years before it was created.
It's cool that some people at the BBC tried to make a video streaming app. Many companies tried, several successfully, yet Netflix beat all of them for a whole variety of reasons. I seriously doubt BBC had the engineering talent to defeat Netflix, even if there weren't millions of regulations preventing a government-owned media company from innovating.
I'm in the UK and our local ISP was doing Video on Demand over TCP/IP around 2000, it also had online shopping (deals with local stores), movies and TV shows.
They where early with a massive ADSL rollout so they had the bandwidth when much of the country was still on dial-up.
We had it as part of the beta period when I lived at home and it was really good for the time.
Actually earlier than that, 2002/3 iirc, I know as I tried it out and it at the time used a p2p distribution method, which was a bit aggressive and you could close the client and still get requests days later from other clients due to caching.
Which for online gaming and the cutting edge broadband of 1MB down, just didn't sit well with me. So I gave up on it.
Also of note, they did trial 3G before it rolled out publicly with Three and one of the first tests was to stream a film, which they did (The Matrix) as a test, this was 2002 . I know this as spoke with few of the chaps working on it at the time over lunch one day as I was working for the World Service upon a digital playout system that would see the death of tape and full digital end-end system for the entire BBC radio output. Fun times.
Though around that time the current government (Labour) was busy outsourcing much of the BBC and we saw many whole area's tupped out, which was sad as I'd previously worked at the DOH and saw the whole splitting up and effective prioritisation of whole rafts of the DOH/NHS under the guise of outsourcing and other less well thought out short term quick fix, long -term debt bombing nightmares.
See that's kinda the thing - politics and such things often clash and in the UK it's been a see-saw of one party then the other which has seen many short-sighted moves for short term on paper gains of back patting, and the fallout pushed onto the other party once they take power. Hence many things over the past few decades been stymied and handicapped in the UK in government departments. Seen some serious talent wasted, messed about and general mistreated - just to make a set of accounts look good in the short term.
Actually, the misunderstanding is yours. Technical issues are a small part of the challenge. The 'iPlayer' is not the product, for the most part, the content is.
Because UK competitors are not going to provide the BBC any content, and they don't have the kind financing to buy from the US, who even then were not up for this kind of deal and it took an incredible bit of BD innovation by Netflix to even get that going. The BBC would have been be able to put its own content on the web, and not much more, which is not much of an innovation.
Finally, there's a good reason the BBC's charter is limiting in scope, like any other business, how would you like it if you were suddenly found out of a job because someone with incredible power in the government was able to waive their hands, raise taxes/fees thereby 'forcing customers to exist' for their competing product, which is probably inferior by virtue of the fact they don't actually have to provide much value at all and can continue on with their guaranteed revenue stream?
That’s not entirely fair IMO. The BBC already had deals with ITV and Channel 4 to put their content on the new Project Kangaroo service before it was killed off.
It's fair because there's an underlying competitive issue: if said new project represented in any way a threat to those other entities, they would not, or stop providing the content.
For example, Disney has pulled their content from Netflix.
> The BBC iPlayer was streaming video to the whole of the U.K. in 2007.
Exactly. In 2007, The BBC believed that the UK == The World with iPlayer. So no innovation from them happened until a new challenger approached.
I was on holiday in another country and attempted to watch iPlayer shows and access was blocked (and is still blocked) even with a VPN and I used to pay for their TV license at the time. I'm not surprised why many kids these days choose online instead of TV to watch when they want, where-ever they want rather than wait. Also BBC iPlayer programmes still have a habit of 'vanishing' if you wait too long.
The technology was available only in the UK and the BBC was ahead of its time with iPlayer but Netflix said "Thanks for your idea and we're very inspired by the BBC..." and repeated this and made it accessible to the whole world which the BBC is still left wondering why they didn't succeed after getting disturbed by Netflix in 2010.
> Exactly. In 2007, The BBC believed that the UK == The World with iPlayer
The complaints you make are largely directives from the regulator. The BBC has only recently managed to get the regulations relaxed so it is permitted to keep programming on iPlayer longer than a couple of weeks. The lack of access outside the UK largely stems from its requirement to licence content from independent producers and enable them to re-sell the content to other international broadcasters. You couldn't watch iPlayer overseas because in many cases the BBC (due to regulators' directives) did not hold the rights to show its programming to you outside the UK.
One of the reasons the BBC could not have defeated Netflix is because the regulations say that the BBC is not allowed to out-compete commercial companies. Several BBC operations have been forced to close because they were too successful.
I'd argue the BBC actually has quite some talent working for them. Just have a look at their Open Source Website [0], these aren't the projects of the average company.
The platform they run currently is already capable of a lot, and given their knowledge about media production and delivery they, of all the companies out there would have the engineering talent.
Anecdotal, but a couple years ago I spoke with an engineer working at the BBC and he had nothing but praise for the kind of state-of-the-art work they were doing (our initial topic was GPU clusters), most of it on Red Hat Linux — in sharp contrast with most of this industry apparently, at least historically.
They really seemed to have a well-funded, well-hired and well-meaning engineering department.
Yeah, paywise you could get more working for some bank etc in the private sector and my first job working for Eastern ELectricity Board saw me on a £3k salary a year (1983), left and tripled that.
When I worked for the BBC (2002) I was on £42k a year, official title was DBA, though did more non DBA work and was at a level in which I could tell the top people my views and what needed to be done and they listened.
Thing is in tech, it's not what you're paid per year, it's how many hours you work for that pay a year. Could have a £50k job and work 9-5 or a £50k job and end up cutting 80 hours weeks all the time. Details like that are never reflected in the salary.
And how good the work is. In the Beeb, I worked on interesting projects, for a worthy cause, using a tech stack chosen collectively by the team. Many of the projects instigated by the team, rather than pushed on to us from elsewhere.
Since leaving, a lot of the work I have done has been boring and predetermined.
I might add - the pay has got much worse since you were there. The collective pay increase was 1% most years, which also applied to the banding so would have affected new hires as well. Since 2011, the pension has been no better than in any other organisation.
As an employee, not having a TV license if you needed done was gross misconduct. Which is probably still the case.
As for the license - personally that needed overhauling years ago, should just pop a % tax on all these streaming and subscription services and cover the bbc from that. Alas it has so many niche area's and legacy that to transition to a private entity would change it into something people would not like or appreciate and kill it - that seems in part to be known by government at least. Also, BBC monitoring and things like that have a role for the country/government.
I pay money to you to develop a TV program, you sell that TV program to Netflix and make money, and then you tax me purchasing the product. So instead of being content with fleecing me once, you want to fleece me three times...er, no. And the idea of funding yourself by taxing your competition is utterly repellent.
I am not unfamiliar with the BBC, most of my knowledge about Kangaroo came from someone I knew who was on the Trust, but it is just a totally broken institution. I have never managed to work out if the hiring policy just finds bad people or something happens to people they hire after they start working there but it is just horribly broken.
>I pay money to you to develop a TV program, you sell that TV program to Netflix and make money, and then you tax me purchasing the product. So instead of being content with fleecing me once, you want to fleece me three times...er, no. And the idea of funding yourself by taxing your competition is utterly repellent.
No, that's not what I suggested, as I was advocating replacing the TV license, not running it in parallel as you portray, so no, just no.
>I am not unfamiliar with the BBC, most of my knowledge about Kangaroo came from someone I knew who was on the Trust, but it is just a totally broken institution. I have never managed to work out if the hiring policy just finds bad people or something happens to people they hire after they start working there but it is just horribly broken.
You seem to confuse your experience with `management` and project that upon all staff and without qualifying what you class as `bad` and yet happily postulate that as record, most odd.
Haha, you really don't get this. I have already paid the licence fee, you have already the developed the program...you are just charging me a third time for it.
The BBC Trust isn't (wasn't) "management".
I class as bad almost everything you have said. It is self-evident. Fundamentally, I disagree with people being ripped off.
For people that aren't necessarily just chasing a higher salary, it can be very satisfying to work at a place like the BBC, or some parts of the government, charities, academia, NGOs etc.
You work to benefit the public in some way, you can usually talk freely about your job (and therefore people are more interested to listen), and there's probably less stress.
I'm not sure they got it right here but there is a valid reason for this kind of regulation.
> The British TV industry wouldn’t see an on-demand service for nearly another decade.
I'm sorry, what? There was an on demand service before this, as talked about in the article. And it absolutely didn't take until near 2019 to see others appearing.
> Netflix would’ve never stood a chance of getting its current market penetration [in the UK],” says the BBC source. “All the big players would have had the market covered for streaming video-on-demand (SVOD)
That's kind of the point though, isn't it?