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> 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 o
by teh_klev 7y ago
> 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).
- IanCal 7y agoYes, 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).