17 ms·

The BBC’s attempt to build a Netflix-style service was snuffed by regulation

167 points by open-source-ux 7y ago

seibelj 7y ago
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.
- archgrove 7y ago
  I think you’re misunderstanding. This was built. The BBC iPlayer was streaming video to the whole of the U.K. in 2007.
  - noir_lord 7y ago
    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.
  - Brakenshire 7y ago
    Yep, the barriers were purely legal, not technical.
  - jariel 7y ago
    "I think you’re misunderstanding." 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.
    - roywiggins 7y ago
      Why would the BBC not be at something of an advantage over Netflix when it came to content?
      - jariel 7y ago
        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?
        mikehall314 7y ago
        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.
        jariel 7y ago
        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.
  - rvz 7y ago
    > 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. Classic tale of the tortoise and the hare.
    - wbillingsley 7y ago
      > 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.
  - Zenst 7y ago
    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.
  - heavenlyblue 7y ago
    So who cares if it was the first? USSR won the space race at the time, and where are they now?
    - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
      The only country capable of sending scheduled passenger carrying trips to the ISS?
- dna_polymerase 7y ago
  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. [0]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/opensource/ https://www.bbc.co.uk/opensource/
  - K0SM0S 7y ago
    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.
    - bencoder 7y ago
      I work with quite a few ex-BBC developers. It seems to be more of a labor of love. They universally have said that it's poorly paid, relatively.
      - RugnirViking 7y ago
        I've often wondered what causes I would take a big pay cut to work for, and that is probably one of them for me. Always loved the BBC.
      - Zenst 7y ago
        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.
- DanBC 7y ago
  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. https://www.ofcom.org.uk/tv-radio-and-on-demand/information-for-industry/bbc-operating-framework/competition https://www.ofcom.org.uk/tv-radio-and-on-demand/information-...
  - user00012-ab 7y ago
    This is why they made the last two seasons of Doctor Who so horrible; they aren't allowed to compete with good sci-fi shows.
phire 7y ago
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. Source, A promotional/technical video from the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1AiM1S8MGk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1AiM1S8MGk
- sofaofthedamned 7y ago
  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.
  - gerdesj 7y ago
    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.
    - robocat 7y ago
      British Boffin/Scientist meme in Russia: https://siberiantimes.com/science/opinion/features/british-scientists-mocked-as-outlandish-and-zany-in-siberia/ https://siberiantimes.com/science/opinion/features/british-s... 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.“
chrisseaton 7y ago
Why does the BBC want to 'kill' Netflix? Why isn't it enough to provide their own service? Why do they want to 'kill' off independent competitors?
- phire 7y ago
  Sensationalist headlines; "Netflix-killer" brings the clicks. This all happened years before Netflix even launched in the UK and was in development in parallel with the US version of on-demand streaming. But given how much of a lead the BBC streaming service had, it probably would have hampered Netflix's efforts to launch in the UK.
  - hogFeast 7y ago
    They didn't have a lead. 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).
    - Mindwipe 7y ago
      > 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.
IanCal 7y ago
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) That's kind of the point though, isn't it?
- mikehall314 7y ago
  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.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    > 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.
    - whycombagator 7y ago
      > 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?
dblooman 7y ago
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.
underwater 7y ago
> 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.
- flir 7y ago
  ITV's got it bad.
Proven 7y ago
Oh yeah? Shut them down and stop playing VC with taxpayer money!
veeralpatel979 7y ago
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!
- flir 7y ago
  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.
  - peteretep 7y ago
    BBC Worldwide and content production has been as purposefully hobbled by Murdoch and anti-monopoly laws as the rest of the Beeb
- peteretep 7y ago
  wat? > Could BBC have hired the talent to build and scale a credible competitor? Yes, iPlayer pre-dates digital Netflix by a significant margin And BBC content is sold widely worldwide.
  - heavenlyblue 7y ago
    Well, Minitel predated internet, yet they were forgotten about, too. I would presume it’s the British exceptionalism that would make a difference here?
  - buzzerbetrayed 7y ago
    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.
hogFeast 7y ago
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.
INTPenis 7y ago
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. It's just important to find a balance.
- tomhoward 7y ago
  > a site full of VC entrepreneurs 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.
maxehmookau 7y ago
Weird. Because soon, government regulation will probably _force_ the BBC to build a Netflix-style service.
lagadu 7y ago
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.
- TheNorthman 7y ago
  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.
gpmcadam 7y ago
Lift the regulations. Let them compete on the open market.
Jaruzel 7y ago
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.
- Mindwipe 7y ago
  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.
jameshart 7y ago
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.

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.

archgrove 7y ago
I think you’re misunderstanding. This was built. The BBC iPlayer was streaming video to the whole of the U.K. in 2007.
- noir_lord 7y ago
  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.
- Brakenshire 7y ago
  Yep, the barriers were purely legal, not technical.
- jariel 7y ago
  "I think you’re misunderstanding." 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.
  - roywiggins 7y ago
    Why would the BBC not be at something of an advantage over Netflix when it came to content?
    - jariel 7y ago
      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?
      - mikehall314 7y ago
        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.
        jariel 7y ago
        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.
- rvz 7y ago
  > 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. Classic tale of the tortoise and the hare.
  - wbillingsley 7y ago
    > 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.
- Zenst 7y ago
  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.
- heavenlyblue 7y ago
  So who cares if it was the first? USSR won the space race at the time, and where are they now?
  - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    The only country capable of sending scheduled passenger carrying trips to the ISS?
dna_polymerase 7y ago
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. [0]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/opensource/ https://www.bbc.co.uk/opensource/
- K0SM0S 7y ago
  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.
  - bencoder 7y ago
    I work with quite a few ex-BBC developers. It seems to be more of a labor of love. They universally have said that it's poorly paid, relatively.
    - RugnirViking 7y ago
      I've often wondered what causes I would take a big pay cut to work for, and that is probably one of them for me. Always loved the BBC.
    - Zenst 7y ago
      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.
DanBC 7y ago
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. https://www.ofcom.org.uk/tv-radio-and-on-demand/information-for-industry/bbc-operating-framework/competition https://www.ofcom.org.uk/tv-radio-and-on-demand/information-...
- user00012-ab 7y ago
  This is why they made the last two seasons of Doctor Who so horrible; they aren't allowed to compete with good sci-fi shows.

phire 7y ago

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. Source, A promotional/technical video from the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1AiM1S8MGk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1AiM1S8MGk

sofaofthedamned 7y ago
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.
- gerdesj 7y ago
  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.
  - robocat 7y ago
    British Boffin/Scientist meme in Russia: https://siberiantimes.com/science/opinion/features/british-scientists-mocked-as-outlandish-and-zany-in-siberia/ https://siberiantimes.com/science/opinion/features/british-s... 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.“

chrisseaton 7y ago

Why does the BBC want to 'kill' Netflix? Why isn't it enough to provide their own service? Why do they want to 'kill' off independent competitors?

phire 7y ago
Sensationalist headlines; "Netflix-killer" brings the clicks. This all happened years before Netflix even launched in the UK and was in development in parallel with the US version of on-demand streaming. But given how much of a lead the BBC streaming service had, it probably would have hampered Netflix's efforts to launch in the UK.
- hogFeast 7y ago
  They didn't have a lead. 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).
  - Mindwipe 7y ago
    > 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.

IanCal 7y ago

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) That's kind of the point though, isn't it?

mikehall314 7y ago
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.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  > 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.
  - whycombagator 7y ago
    > 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?

dblooman 7y ago

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.

underwater 7y ago

> 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.

flir 7y ago
ITV's got it bad.

Proven 7y ago

Oh yeah? Shut them down and stop playing VC with taxpayer money!

veeralpatel979 7y ago

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!

flir 7y ago
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.
- peteretep 7y ago
  BBC Worldwide and content production has been as purposefully hobbled by Murdoch and anti-monopoly laws as the rest of the Beeb
peteretep 7y ago
wat? > Could BBC have hired the talent to build and scale a credible competitor? Yes, iPlayer pre-dates digital Netflix by a significant margin And BBC content is sold widely worldwide.
- heavenlyblue 7y ago
  Well, Minitel predated internet, yet they were forgotten about, too. I would presume it’s the British exceptionalism that would make a difference here?
- buzzerbetrayed 7y ago
  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.

hogFeast 7y ago

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.

INTPenis 7y ago

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. It's just important to find a balance.

tomhoward 7y ago
> a site full of VC entrepreneurs 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.

maxehmookau 7y ago

Weird. Because soon, government regulation will probably _force_ the BBC to build a Netflix-style service.

lagadu 7y ago

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.

TheNorthman 7y ago
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.

gpmcadam 7y ago

Lift the regulations. Let them compete on the open market.

Jaruzel 7y ago

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.

Mindwipe 7y ago
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.

jameshart 7y ago

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.