9 ms·

The example given is the BBC. A service funded by licence fee payers who are resident in the UK. Why should a service, that is advert free and wholly paid for

• virtualSatai 10y ago
  Wouldn't it make sense for the BBC to sell their service to people outside of the UK? Aren't they allowed to? Or do they already?
  • ucaetano 10y ago
    They do that already, through licensing.
    • dceddia 10y ago
      To individuals, though? Licensing works great if some big company deems it profitable enough to license the show I want to watch, but isn't a full solution otherwise.
      • ucaetano 10y ago
        Sure, but does the additional cost of licensing to individuals make economic sense? It almost sounds as if people want companies to be forced to make their content available at a desirable price to anyone in the planet, no matter the cost of it. In other words, people are talking as if they have the "right" to see that content.
        • Karunamon 10y ago
          Rather, when dealing with post-scarcity goods, the seller has two, and only two options: Monetize the people that are getting that content, or spend money and resource playing pirate whackamole. One of these two things makes money. We're halfway through the 2010s, if a random web developer can paywall content and take money for access in hours, then the BBC can manage. I want to give them money. They won't let me. Their loss. My conscience is clear when I watch Countdown through a UK proxy.
          • 794CD01 10y ago
            Both make money. If the second option didn't, as you disingenuously imply, they wouldn't be trying to stop the piracy.
            • Karunamon 10y ago
              That implies a rational business. Rationally, new content ends up on the internet, unencrypted, within minutes of air, and all the whackamole in the world doesn't change that. All the anti-piracy methods practiced by major content providers is inherently irrational.
              • Fargren 10y ago
                Not all of them. The ones that convince people that piracy is immoral may actually get some people to buy content.
              • 794CD01 10y ago
                That argument is asinine. Murder happens even though we outlaw it and enforce the law. That doesn't make the law ineffectual or "irrational".
                • Karunamon 10y ago
                  ...Please try to understand how "asinine" a comparison between copyright infringement and murder is.
  • joaorj 10y ago
    I don't think it makes sense to force business plans on companies.
    • mynameismonkey 10y ago
      BBC isn't a company in the traditional sense, it's a public service established by charter. The UK can and does "force" it to do many things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC#Charter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC#Charter
    • ubernostrum 10y ago
      I don't think it makes sense to force business plans on companies. And yet we've done it multiple times in the US. We routinely encounter situations in the media industry where a new medium is hated/feared by the entrenched players who try to use refusal to license content as a way to kill the new medium before it takes off. Up until very recently, the standard solution to this, in order to not have artifically-granted monopolies on content stifle technological innovation, was for Congress to impose mandatory licensing schemes on the copyright holders. That's how cable TV originally got off the ground, for example; over-the-air broadcast networks didn't want to license their content to cable, but Congress imposed mandatory licensing on them. Result: brand-new multi-billion-dollar industry that kept those networks alive a while longer.
• ucaetano 10y ago
  I had the same feeling. I read through the site and have no idea of what's being proposed.
  • joaorj 10y ago
    I hate geoblocking, but looking trough the site I only felt like facepalm. It's the same as poverty sucks so let's give 1000$ a month to everybody and somehow where the money will come from will be figured out by someone.
    • ucaetano 10y ago
      Well, we Swiss just rejected that same idea. No such thing as a free lunch. http://www.swissinfo.ch/directdemocracy/vote-june-6_basic-income-plan-awaits-voters-verdict/42200378 http://www.swissinfo.ch/directdemocracy/vote-june-6_basic-in...
    • rat87 10y ago
      Universal minimum income is a lot nuanced then that. It's meant to replace a lot of service like food stamps and housing vouchers and let the poor pick what they spend their money on and avoid bureaucracy. It's also meant to prevent the "welfare trap", an over-exaggerated but real problem, where getting a job and earning money can cost you more in benefits then you gain from the job. There's been interesting studies lately on the effects of direct cash charity and a lot of study showing the effects of the earned income tax credit, 2 things which have strong similarities to universal income.
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  • c3o 10y ago
    Can you go into detail how we could improve https://endgeoblocking.eu/#todo https://endgeoblocking.eu/#todo ? I'll expand, at the risk of indulging in jargon: 1. Pass EU law that applies the country of origin principle as seen in the Cable and Satellite Directive to online "broadcasts" as well, establishing legal grounds for services to make passive (non-advertised) sales to customers from countries they have not acquired distribution rights for. 2. The European Commission clarifies that contractual clauses requiring inner-EU geoblocking are null because they do not constitute justified exceptions from the anti-discrimination/antitrust provisions Article 20 of the Services Directive and/or Article 101 TFEU. 3. Parliament & Council pass the Portability Regulation before them today without adding undue restrictions, enabling European to take their paid content subscriptions with them across borders for temporary stays. The result of these 3 easily doable actions would be to massively reduce geoblocking within the EU by removing the most common obligations to geoblock: Contractual clauses by rightholders and legal uncertainty/risk that causes overblocking/geoblocking-by-default. Rightholders could continue to bind distributors/services to the release window system (cinemas first, then DVD, then VoD), to restrict which countries they may actively target/advertise to, and of course retain full autonomy over dubbing/subtitling and other localization. Services could continue to geoblock to comply with other local laws (e.g. gambling, child protection).
• narag 10y ago
  Why should a service, that is advert free and wholly paid for by the UK licence payers, be free to people elsewhere? So, UK license payers enjoy the service they paid for when they're travelling outside the UK, right?
  • stoozer 10y ago
    So why not provide login access with TV licenses.
    • jwdunne 10y ago
      They don't even do that here. You are only forced to pay the fee by law if you have a device that you use to watch TV as its aired (along with some other rules). The way this is enforced is by someone who goes round to each house and verifies you have a license. They can't force their way in. There isn't a way, as far as I know, where they can just turn your TV access off, unlike cable companies can. A pass for international use would be a bit odd without doing something like that here at home first.
      • vetinari 10y ago
        This would be actually simple. Encrypt the broadcast and require CAM for decoding. Each card has a number and while there is a payment coming for the card, the card is active. So next time the broadcast is changing and requires updated tuners (i.e. DVB-T2 and HEVC with 4K), just require one with CI. Everyone is happy - those, who want TV get TV, those who don't, do not have to pay.
      • IanCal 10y ago
        > They don't even do that here. They've not been allowed to until very recently, and it's likely that this will be added soon(tm).
      • DanBC 10y ago
        The iPlayer loophole is closing pretty soon though.
• zanny 10y ago
  There is certainly an argument to be made for the UK to just let internationals access the BBC content for free, since, one, they get significantly less per view outside of the UK for it (relative to the taxes per Brit that funds the BBC) and two, BBC content can drive demand for the rest of the British entertainment sector globally. There are plenty of films and third party studios operating in the UK, and they would probably appreciate more broad adoption of British media around the world.
  • vertex-four 10y ago
    > There are plenty of films and third party studios operating in the UK, and they would probably appreciate more broad adoption of British media around the world. On the other hand, they might very well see the BBC providing free access to iPlayer etc to the world as competition within a niche market.
• IanCal 10y ago
  What is provided by the BBC and provided by BBC Worldwide is entirely different. Aside, it also depends on what you mean by geoblocking. Should I, who pays for the BBC each month, suddenly lose access because I'm away in France for business? Or more generally, if people are willing to pay the licence fee, why should it matter where they live? Nobody says it has to be free for everyone outside the UK, but could people outside the UK not pay exactly the same and expect to get the same back?
  • ucaetano 10y ago
    The issue is that the BBC already sold the rights to those other countries. In most cases, it can force the local rights-owners (who paid good money to BBC) to hand them back.
• lgbr 10y ago
  In order to be fair to people elsewhere, it need not be free. You simply need people elsewhere to pay the same license that the people in the UK do. Currently it's not at all possible to pay the license fee and watch from outside the UK, and this is where the discrimination lies. But, then again, if I pay a license fee in France, why shouldn't I be able to watch licensed content in the UK? This works for retirement schemes. If I live in the US and pay into Social Security, then after 20 years move to the UK and pay into their pension scheme, subsequently retire there, I will be credited for paying into Social Security despite being paid out by National Insurance.
• click170 10y ago
  > Why should a service, that is advert free and wholly paid for by the UK licence payers, be free to people elsewhere? Free would be great, but for the BBC I would settle for being able to pay a fair fee for access. On the whole I dislike the way every company has their own streaming service these days but BBC pretty consistently produces good quality content and they don't focus exclusively on entertainment, their educational shows are actually what I prefer. I'm no expert but I can think of a couple ideas. - stop doing exclusive agreements for a region - explicitly exclude streaming from agreemnets that do region locking - treat the internet as a new region entirely Thoughts? Edit: mobile typos & formatting
  • josteink 10y ago
    > - treat the internet as a new region entirely This is actually how the internet work, or at least worked, until the olde guard discovered that it could be used for digital distribution. Here they had the most perfect distribution mechanism on earth. A global market at their hands, at zero cost, without the need for middle-men. So what did they do? Did they see the potential this gave them? No, because it didn't match their existing broadcasting licence contracts. Nope. They did the only thing natural: Instead of changing the contracts, they're trying to change the internet. Invest everything they could into systems which makes digital distribution painful, less functional, and intentionally delivering all content in incompatible formats not playable by most players and devices (DRMed), and ensure that nobody anywhere any benefits from the new technology, except them. Why do we even allow them to do this? If this is how the future is going to work, I might start longing for the 80s again. I can't wait for these dinosaurs to die. They're ruining this great internet we have here, one bit at a time.
    • mikestew 10y ago
      Here they had the most perfect distribution mechanism on earth. A global market at their hands, at zero cost, without the need for middle-men. This is the part that mystifies me: sacrifice sales to preserve an old model. Oh, I know that the guilty parties don't think they're sacrificing sales because licensing models, blah, blah, blah. And maybe I need to sit down, do the math, and find out they're right. But it'll take some convincing for me to believe that between these two choices: 1. Hey, 7 billion people on the planet, if you have internet access and $5, you can watch this. 2. Hey, Brits, wanna watch a cool show? Tune in tomorrow. 'mericuns? No, we won't be taking your money right now. But we'll take it next year. When? Oh, we don't know, we have some deals to cut first. Okay, we'll take your money now. What? You found something else to occupy your viewing time in those six month? What's that, Costa Rica? No, I don't even see you on the list. Maybe next year. ...#2 makes the most money. While taking little interest in the whole business, were I to guess it's due to fifedoms and entrenched interests. That Costa Rican distributor wants his cut, too.
• K0nserv 10y ago
  Doesn't say the content should be free, it says it should be available. Classic case of "please take my money".
  • ucaetano 10y ago
    It is (usually) available through licensing. And there's a major cost (deal, legal, infrastructure) to making content available in a new country. Who should cover that cost if the demand is too low?
    • K0nserv 10y ago
      I was only correcting the parent regarding the BBC. I don't have enough knowledge about the industry to comment on the surrounding costs, but I imagine that there's a lot of content where it would be worth it.
• Faaak 10y ago
  I guess that I somebody wants to see show X, then it will see show X. That can either be done via the provider's website (BBC/YT), via DVD, or via illegal download. Now, if a british expat is living in Spain and wants to watch the show, they will go on BBC's youtube channel. Video not available ? Well then, go to TPB or any streaming website. Better earn a bit than nothing (eg: GoT). You only see one end of the problem: if all the countries "open their contents", well then everybody pays for everybody.
  • ucaetano 10y ago
    The vast majority of content isn't owned by countries. BBC content outside the UK isn't (usually) owned by the BBC.
• FreeFull 10y ago
  The part that sucks is that you can't access BBC Worldwide content from the UK, only from other countries.
• DrJokepu 10y ago
  > Why should a service, that is advert free and wholly paid for by the UK licence payers, be free to people elsewhere? Because UK residents would have access to the online streams of other EU public broadcasters for free as well.
  • ascorbic 10y ago
    Not much of a balanced trade. The UK is by far the biggest exporter of TV content in Europe. Nowhere else is even close.
    • programLyrique 10y ago
      Source? According to http://www.digitaltveurope.net/527032/france-and-turkey-join-biggest-programme-exporters/ http://www.digitaltveurope.net/527032/france-and-turkey-join..., worldwide, France ranks 3rd (but I've not been able to find the numbers, and the numbers just for Europe).
    • DrJokepu 10y ago
      We're talking specifically about the BBC (and perhaps Channel 4) here, not the entire British television industry. Even though the BBC have a few internationally successful hit shows, the vast majority of Europeans simply don't speak English well enough to be able enjoy these programmes without some sort of localisation so the audience of these streams would be rather limited in practice.
      • izacus 10y ago
        That's just not true. Significant chunk (50%+) of other Europe speaks english and can easily watch those programs.
        • c3o 10y ago
          I think you're overestimating this. German-speakers, for example, are proficient in English above the EU average but culturally used to watching exclusively dubbed content (widely available because their market is big enough to make it profitable), so mainstream audiences surely won't suddenly switch to consuming English content. I would wager that the Nordic countries are probably the only where both high proficiency and high comfort with untranslated content are close to being mainstream.
• Cypher 10y ago
  As a paying member, why can't other people around the world experience the shows I've funded. It doesn't cost anything to release a torrent and I'm happy to spread our culture.
  • hardwaresofton 10y ago
    If the organization (and it's paying members, depending on the governance model) could come to that decision, that'd be great, but that's certainly not the default for most organizations that produce such high-value content (I personally think the BBC is one of the best news outfits in the world). Also, some paying members might prefer to charge those who don't directly contribute to offset the cost of their own contributions.
    • philipov 10y ago
      Except that charging more people doesn't offset; the goal will never be to offset, it will be to generate the greatest possible revenue. Even non-profit corporations have executives who personally benefit from salaries and the power to distribute them.
  • mpswardle 10y ago
    Since the BBC create a large amount of revenue from licensing the shows out. If it was distributed free then either our license fee would have to go up or they'd have to drop the quality of the content with the reduced funding.
    • ucaetano 10y ago
      Not to mention that they can't legally do it in many places, since they already sold the rights to part of the content in other countries.
• laktak 10y ago
  If I visit the UK I can watch the BBC (I did not pay). If a UK visits another country he can't (he payed). Geolocation does not make sense.
  • yoz-y 10y ago
    But it is the simplest way to assure that vast majority of people who paid can watch and vice versa.
  • ascorbic 10y ago
    If you visit the UK and watch in a hotel then the hotel paid for it. If you're watching on iPlayer then you'll have clicked-through a warning saying you need a licence to watch.
    • pbhjpbhj 10y ago
      >If you're watching on iPlayer then you'll have clicked-through a warning saying you need a licence to watch. // In the UK you can freely watch iPlayer content as long as it's not currently being broadcast [roughly speaking, it's more nuanced than that]. The laws surrounding license fees refer to broadcasts, on-demand is not broadcast in those terms. This is a good thing IMO.
• davb 10y ago
  I'm not entirely fond of BBC programming and the licence fee model as a whole. I'd rather see it turn into a subscription service here at home too. That said, it's already funded and paid for so why not let others access it freely? Contribute some art and culture to the world. Unless they're actively marketing to a global audience, allowing free global access won't cost any more than allowing only domestic access†. The output is already paid for, I don't want to spite everyone else by saying "you can't have this". I'd love to see more art be published as a public good [1], paid for by those who can and freely enjoyed by all alike. And I say this as a licence fee payer and voter. However, I'm not sure that legislation is the way to go. There's a fine line between the freedom to profit from your art and the freedom of all to enjoy it - I'd rather see a cultural shift where companies and artist who are well compensated are happy to let their art be freely enjoyed. † I understand that for an internet-based distribution platform this isn't strictly true (bandwidth and server capacity). But if the will was there, I'm sure a balance could be struck involving liberal traditional syndication and rebroadcast rights, and syndicated CDN infrastructure. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good
  • ucaetano 10y ago
    "I'd love to see more art be published as a public good [1], paid for by those who can and freely enjoyed by all alike." Do you mean "can" as willing to, or forced to?
    • davb 10y ago
      Ideally, "willing to". I'd like to see a cultural shift where everyone sees the value of broadcast media and news, and those who have the means feel it's their responsibility to contribute in order to further the development and sharing of knowledge and culture. I hate to compare it to open source software (because I don't think we've really settled on an ideal and universally appealing method of funding); but currently depending on the license, open source software is generally freely enjoyable by all and funded by those individuals and corporations who can and wish to do so. Humble Bundle is another great example. Everyone pays - those with little (money or will to pay) can pay £0.01, those with more can and do pay much more, effectively becoming patrons. Edit: Humble Bundle is another great example (just to highlight that while not open source, their funding model is innovative and objectively quite successful).
• elviejo 10y ago
  What do the UK licence payers win by the current situation? Why would they loose if people in other contries could see it? That is the point of post-scarcity economics... The knowledge and information of the BBC could impact millions instead of billions, and the current payers wouldn't miss a thing.
  • stoozer 10y ago
    But they would though. They would lose out on the quality programmes that could have been made with revenue from outside the UK.
• __jal 10y ago
  > Why should a service, that is advert free and wholly paid for by the UK licence payers, be free to people elsewhere? Why should libraries, wholly paid for by local citizens, not demand citizen-units' papers to ensure they are local before allowing them to partake of all that juicy, non-rivalrous knowledge? Because they are in the business of providing knowledge, not being gate keepers. (They have to gate-keep to some extent, of course, but that is more about keeping the collection healthy.) Mike Masnik (Techdirt), I think, was the first to make the case that people's understanding of economics seems to break down when encountering zero-cost. It is a real problem. The BBS example reflects a time when a island nation-state was looking for a way to fund public TV. The non-rivalrous nature of airwave reception led them to a (much mocked and hated, but functional) taxation system. Now that "broadcast" generally means "internet", for that model to work, artificial scarcity must be employed, denying people benefits that could be provided at zero marginal cost to protect a funding mechanism that only makes sense in hindsight. Fixing the mechanism to function in a changed world would seem to make more sense to me. But then I'm not British, a politician or dependent on an out of date system for my dinner, so what do I know.
  • untog 10y ago
    That example doesn't really work - the BBC enforces geo-restrictions because it sells its content internationally, to those who do not pay the license fee. There isn't really a library equivalent of that.
    • eldondev 10y ago
      You could call Inter Library Loans a version of this, but it's free. If my library doesn't have a piece of media, it is very possible that I could get that piece of media from another library across the country. I might pay postage, but depending on the library, it might still be free. Like the non-brit who has not paid the licensing fee, I paid no taxes to the other library, but in this case I can still take advantage of that resource. This sort-of already happens with BBC and US Public Broadcasting, but I don't think BBC probably licenses anything back from WABE here.
      • 10y ago
• terryf 10y ago
  Ok, but then let me pay for it. Because I can not pay for it a lot of the time. Instead of the blocked screen show me "enter credit card for $.99 and watch all you want" that would be hard to argue with. Seriously, dragging the entertainment industry along until they realise that the internet actually is global is such a pain.
  • c3o 10y ago
    Rightholders usually don't allow services to let you pay for it if you're from another country. At least implicitly, their estimation is that accepting your money would damage their ability to exclusively license content 28 times in the EU, and that eroding that system would do more harm to the bottom line than the extra money they might make. In practice, the vast majority of content is of course not successfully licensed 28 times, so they end up turning away/not even aiming for the majority of their potential customers for the majority of their works. Whether the current model is really best for rightholders' (maybe just publishers') bottom lines is up for debate -- in their calculation, they are probably biased towards prolonging the established business models that come from the times of terrestrial TV broadcasting/physical media sales. What is clear, from an EU point of view, is that the geoblocking that is required to enforce this model artificially limits the audience of a lot of European cultural products, forces people to seek out copyright-infringing channels, reinforces digital borders between EU member states, harms lingustic minorities etc -- and is just in fundamental conflict with both the idea of the common EU market and the internet as a global medium. (Disclosure: I made the campaign site.)
    • geodel 10y ago
      Right. Just to add for example HBO's content is way cheaper in India than US itself because they would have to figure what local population can afford there.
    • PeterisP 10y ago
      Right, so if legislators and voters feel that the current use of the law-granted rights results in undesirable results, they can alter the conditions so that the publishers are not allowed to region-lock or do exclusive licencing limited to a particular part of the EU. Just as they do with many other industries to facilitate the goal of a single EU market.
• mikestew 10y ago
  Edit: I mentioned the BBC because that was the example given. I understand that you'd rather not pound on a singular example. But I think the BBC is a prime example. For the last Olympics I wanted BBC coverage, if only because in the U. S. you can...not...get coverage unless you have cable. One can either VPN or do what I did and setup a Linode in London for ssh tunneling. Knowing how the BBC is funded, I wanted to pay my fair share. At the time, unless one lives in the U. K., there is no way to do that. I put a fair effort into trying to find something to tell me how, too, not just "click...didn't find anything, time to enjoy free TV!". Sell me a three week license for $50, say "screw it, Olympics for everyone for three weeks!", something. Or leave money on the table while I give it to Linode. To branch from the singular example, it annoys me to know end when I want to watch someone's content and they will not take my money. Fine, I can pirate in good conciseness, but I just to click, click, enter CC #, start watching, not go track down a torrent or find out if Linode has a data center in that country, et. al. The Oatmeal has a comic on this very topic that should hang in every content exec's office.
  • samwillis 10y ago
    The olympics isn't just the bbc's content though. It's licensed to broadcasters based in region. The bbc couldn't have sold you a three week viewing license if it wanted to. There is no way they would have permission to do so. In most cases the broadcaster isn't the content owner. They have a license for their region and nowhere else.
    • mikestew 10y ago
      You're just the messenger so this is in no way directed at you, and I'm pretty sure you're right without any further sources, but I don't care. That's not my problem to solve, as (for this specific example) I already solved it. But while those responsible squabble over rights, and who's got permission to do what with which content, I'm over here giving money to people that have nothing to do with the production of the Olympics. It's important to understand the "why" of a situation so as to propose reasonable solutions, otherwise one just pulls stuff out of their ass that'll never fly ("all content should just be free", or whatever). But the "well, it's complicated excuse" is just weak. Try that the next time your bug comes up in triage. Go refactor, make it less complicated, get your ass back out there and fix the bug. All the understanding of "why" in the content situation tells me is, "man, you guys are so screwed", because too many entrenched rent-seeking interests don't want to hear my solutions. No matter, as I said I've solved the problem for me (including just watching less TV). But that isn't going to make the McLaren payments for Warner execs.
• c3o 10y ago
  Argument #1 has been made well by several sibling comments: I would argue that the TV license fee is not payment for access to BBC content, but a funding mechanism to enable the creation of high-quality public value content which, once successfully financed, should be disseminated as widely as possible. Argument #2: Estonians pay Estonian TV license fees, Austrians Austrian fees. In a common market and a political union, why do we block eachothers' public-value, publicy funded content from eachother?
  • pmontra 10y ago
    I second that, especially #2. I also notice the irony of the BBC example with the UK possibly leaving the EU soon.
• stormbrew 10y ago
  > Is it being proposed that all copyrighted material be subjected to compulsory universal licensing? Personally, I think this would be a far better copyright reform than any we've gotten in the last hundred years. Compulsory licensing for music, which is largely in effect for public performance and broadcast performance (in North America at least), enables all sorts of great things that just aren't possible in the modern copyright environment. I can think of far worse things in the world for owners of copyrighted works who want to sell that work than for them to have to do so in a fair market.
• return0 10y ago
  An issue is that there is no option to overcome the limit, by paying for example. But still, even the BBC argument is weak. I can watch many free streams, which don't even have ads (because they don't have local advertising inventory), made by commercial entities (e.g. sky news, bloomberg) or state-supported (France24). BBC is just pandering to its "proud supporters". The content is already produced. Britons should be proud to show it to the world.
• Spooky23 10y ago
  The gist that I came away with was that if you have one market, copyright should be portable across that market. The iTunes thing is a better example, IMO. Why shouldn't a Slovenian be able to buy something that a Spainard cannot?