9 ms·

At least in the UK there is content on TV worthy of watching (I got addicted to snooker while there, also some quite interesting shows like "Benefits Britain: L

by haspok 6y ago

At least in the UK there is content on TV worthy of watching (I got addicted to snooker while there, also some quite interesting shows like "Benefits Britain: Life on the Dole"), also, when I moved overseas they paid back the licence fee for the remaining part of the year, no questions asked. Now I'm in Austria and the "content" on TV channels is just ridiculous. Targeted at 70+ pensioners, but why should I pay for their entertainment...

hef19898 6y ago
Back the day, before streaming was a thing, the benfit of Austrian TV was to whatch the same movies like on German private channels. Without any adds. Was quite nice. For obvous reasons, Austrian publc broadcasters lost there liscense in ermany one day. With the exception of the border regions, they cited technical reasons. Not living in a border region, I do rememeber that the Austrian news was quite good to get different perspective. Movies, as I said, were nice as well. I do have to agree, so, that the home-grown entertainment sucks. In Germany as well. It is funny, so, that german public TV is not allowed to create their own streaming service and a lot of content has to removed from their online offerings after a certain period of time. Which kind of sucks. Especially since the rights catalogue of the public German networks, ARD and ZDF, used to be quite impressive. They just decidded to never show any of it before midnight, if at all.
bipson 6y ago
Unfortunately the only demographic that really kept watching Austrian stations is pensioners, and sports fans (the amount of skiing tournaments on our main station in winter is ridiculous). Everyone else often had cable or SAT, which gave you all the German and also Swiss networks, particularly the private ones, where the program is aimed at different demographics (also possible because of vastly larger pockets: German ad market >> Austrian ad market) At least ORF tried to modernize its image, but do you want to lose your main demographic as well? Can you compete (financially) with German private TV and pay TV? Not to mention Netflix, Disney+, etc? There is not really a way out. So were stuck with Skiing, Austrian Soccer, Tatort and Gaming show clones. At least there is a lot of cooperation/joint shopping with German and Swiss (public) stations. The self-created German content could be worse though. Tatort can be quite nice, it is not aiming to be CSI - and that can be a good thing.
- mattlutze 6y ago
  Is there an Austrian version of Tatort? I've only seen episodes/teams based in German cities.
  - hef19898 6y ago
    Yep, Vienna has a team. There is also a Swiss one, I think.
bergstromm466 6y ago
> some quite interesting shows like "Benefits Britain: Life on the Dole" The show that demonizes, humiliates and dehumanizes working class people by filming them being evicted?
- bb123 6y ago
  > > some quite interesting shows like "Benefits Britain: Life on the Dole" > The show that demonizes, humiliates and dehumanizes working class people by filming them being evicted? The show that highlights, amplifies and prioritises the voices of working class people by filming them being evicted?
  - bergstromm466 6y ago
    > The show that highlights, amplifies and prioritises the voices of working class people by filming them being evicted? Thank you for pointing this out. I don't know British TV well so I wrongly assumed it was another show, because it sounded like it. The show I originally thought OP was referring to is called 'Can't Pay? We'll Take it Away!'. It is bile. That is what my above comment is really responding to. It's sad to see people actually laughing at others' misfortune such as this youtuber, who has made a compilation of 'Craziest Freakouts Ever!' with clips from 'Can't Pay? We'll Take it Away!': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0kO9TA96h4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0kO9TA96h4
    - bennyelv 6y ago
      While that may be what some people use "Can't pay, we'll take it away" for, the programme is presented in quite a sympathetic way. Often the enforcement agents have empathy with the people they are enforcing against, particularly when it's clear that the person has a struggle that's no fault of their own. They're far less sympathetic to wealthier people who are just ignoring their responsibilities and trying to get away with it. At least that's how I remember the show, I haven't actually watched broadcast TV for at least 2 years now.
- nailer 6y ago
  You seem to be implying that the BBC is discriminating against working class people by showing people on benefits / being evicted. There are many working class people who are not on benefits or being evicted. You may wish to look for evidence of bias closer to home.
jonathanstrange 6y ago
BBC is awesome, their news is very good and they produce some of the best series in the world. It's a shame that they have split up BBC UK and BBC International so strictly and do everything they can to lock all BBC UK offerings to citizens of the UK. It infuriates me that I'm redirected from bbc.co.uk to bbc.com and are being displayed something else than people in the UK. If I go to bbc.co.uk, I do that to find out what Brits are seeing. My girlfriend would gladly pay for being able to access BBC UK series, but that's apparently impossible. They've made some horrible contracts with BBC International that seem to prohibit that. It makes no sense that she has to resort to illegal streaming even though she'd love to be a paying customer. Another problem is also that BBC International creates and distributes US productions that are far below their normal standards. So if you're looking for BBC nature documentaries, for instance, you have to manually sort out all those trashy international productions that are like National Geographic commercials. As I've said, it's a shame.
- jannes 6y ago
  Apparently there is a subscription service called BritBox - created by BBC and ITV, but it's only available in Australia, USA and Canada. https://www.britbox.com/ https://www.britbox.com/
  - M2Ys4U 6y ago
    I expect that will be slowly expanded; the BBC's new Director-General wants to increase commercial revenue (and immediately before being appointed as DG he was the CEO of BBC Studios, the BBC's commercial subsidiary).
    - powderpig 6y ago
      The new chairman has apparently donated to the Tory party. https://bylinetimes.com/2021/01/06/new-bbc-chairman-richard-sharp-donated-more-than-400000-to-conservative-party/ https://bylinetimes.com/2021/01/06/new-bbc-chairman-richard-... The DG was also a former deputy chairman of Hammersmith and Fulham Conservative party. https://inews.co.uk/news/tim-davie-new-bbc-director-general-conservatives-reset-relations-downing-street-434450 https://inews.co.uk/news/tim-davie-new-bbc-director-general-...
DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
> Now I'm in Austria and the "content" on TV channels is just ridiculous. small demography of 9MM, so the only way to differentiate themselves against bigger German channels is to produce content specifically for that niche. Shows in Austria/CH only value-add are a "local dialect" of actors, or setting the plot/story within Austria/CH. Other than that it's either a poor local copy of German shows (which are often copies of international shows). Having been spoiled by British quality TV for a couple of decades I'd say the BBC is an incredible high yardstick, impossible to reach not just for Austria, but there is nothing like it in DACH. One of my biggest annoyance by far is the dubbing of OC into German. They have only a handful of voice-over actors who they rotate for these jobs so the lead-act of every other movie has the same voice[0]. As a child I thought one of the reasons Eddie Murphy was so funny was because of his incredibly high-pitched voice[1]. Once people sit through the dubbed content most of the meaning and jokes are lost. While other Europeans grow up watching things like Father Ted, Only Fools and Horses and such classics in their __original__ language, I have not 1 German-native friend who is able to follow English language on TV (even there are subs) and they will never get to appreciate other excellent shows like Norseman, Gomorrah, Suburra, because it's "too difficult to read the subs" and they didn't have to since they were kids. [0] Dennis Schmidt-Foß has given voices to Ryan Reynolds, Chris Evans, Eddie Murphy and others. In fact the situation with E Murphy was so bad/ridiculous that they decided to give him a _new_ voice!! That's right the same person now has a different voice and nobody thinks that's odd. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKGAOM0mAOo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKGAOM0mAOo
- zwaps 6y ago
  Germany has a considerably larger population than the UK, and the German public broadcasters are equally terrible as the one in Austria. Good series or programs produced by public television you can count on one hand. Literally. Indeed, they also invest most of their money in entertaining old people. This may be due to the aging population, but I'd rather assume it's good old grifting.
rsynnott 6y ago
> Benefits Britain: Life on the Dole This is by notorious awful tv station Channel 5, and is not paid for by the license fee. (In fairness, it's not amongst their most terrible content; about half of their programming amounts to "Look! Poor people! Haha!", and despite the name this isn't really an example of that.)
pbhjpbhj 6y ago
Benefits Britain is C5, not BBC, so it's not funded by licence fees. Indeed very few programmes appear to be made by the BBC. It seems like what happened/happens is that producers form their own private company, do the work for the BBC but the public don't get to keep the benefit of the work paid for the benefit gets locked away to provide private gains. Long running programmes are now made by third parties when they could easily be made by the BBC proper, Gardeners' Question Time, say. In part is to serve 'talent', but BBC's remit is to fill the gaps where commercial programmes don't go, to be distinctive, so they should never be paying £millions for a talk show host. If you're going to use public money then you should be benefiting the public as much as possible, not carefully twisting it to get private profits.
- Mauricebranagh 6y ago
  That was a political choice to increase competition it also means that more £ goes to the talent.
nebolo 6y ago
Austria has FM4, which is an amazing radio station and well worth license fee. ORF Sport is also pretty good.
pjc50 6y ago
> "Benefits Britain: Life on the Dole" This is the kind of TV program that I think has contributed to the UK's extreme stinginess and bureaucracy of benefits; in aggregate it's probably got people killed. Cherry-picking the most lurid stories to make people look bad. It's also not a BBC show, it's by Channel 5! I'm with a lot of people that the BBC can produce great stuff, but only when it remembers to be Reithian and the managers aren't looking. These days most of the BBC content I watch comes from BBC4, plus the output of David Attenborough. (ORF produce exactly one show with an international reputation: the New Year's Day concert from Vienna, which is lovely)

by haspok 6y ago

hef19898 6y ago

Back the day, before streaming was a thing, the benfit of Austrian TV was to whatch the same movies like on German private channels. Without any adds. Was quite nice. For obvous reasons, Austrian publc broadcasters lost there liscense in ermany one day. With the exception of the border regions, they cited technical reasons. Not living in a border region, I do rememeber that the Austrian news was quite good to get different perspective. Movies, as I said, were nice as well. I do have to agree, so, that the home-grown entertainment sucks. In Germany as well. It is funny, so, that german public TV is not allowed to create their own streaming service and a lot of content has to removed from their online offerings after a certain period of time. Which kind of sucks. Especially since the rights catalogue of the public German networks, ARD and ZDF, used to be quite impressive. They just decidded to never show any of it before midnight, if at all.

bipson 6y ago

Unfortunately the only demographic that really kept watching Austrian stations is pensioners, and sports fans (the amount of skiing tournaments on our main station in winter is ridiculous). Everyone else often had cable or SAT, which gave you all the German and also Swiss networks, particularly the private ones, where the program is aimed at different demographics (also possible because of vastly larger pockets: German ad market >> Austrian ad market) At least ORF tried to modernize its image, but do you want to lose your main demographic as well? Can you compete (financially) with German private TV and pay TV? Not to mention Netflix, Disney+, etc? There is not really a way out. So were stuck with Skiing, Austrian Soccer, Tatort and Gaming show clones. At least there is a lot of cooperation/joint shopping with German and Swiss (public) stations. The self-created German content could be worse though. Tatort can be quite nice, it is not aiming to be CSI - and that can be a good thing.

mattlutze 6y ago
Is there an Austrian version of Tatort? I've only seen episodes/teams based in German cities.
- hef19898 6y ago
  Yep, Vienna has a team. There is also a Swiss one, I think.

bergstromm466 6y ago

> some quite interesting shows like "Benefits Britain: Life on the Dole" The show that demonizes, humiliates and dehumanizes working class people by filming them being evicted?

bb123 6y ago
> > some quite interesting shows like "Benefits Britain: Life on the Dole" > The show that demonizes, humiliates and dehumanizes working class people by filming them being evicted? The show that highlights, amplifies and prioritises the voices of working class people by filming them being evicted?
- bergstromm466 6y ago
  > The show that highlights, amplifies and prioritises the voices of working class people by filming them being evicted? Thank you for pointing this out. I don't know British TV well so I wrongly assumed it was another show, because it sounded like it. The show I originally thought OP was referring to is called 'Can't Pay? We'll Take it Away!'. It is bile. That is what my above comment is really responding to. It's sad to see people actually laughing at others' misfortune such as this youtuber, who has made a compilation of 'Craziest Freakouts Ever!' with clips from 'Can't Pay? We'll Take it Away!': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0kO9TA96h4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0kO9TA96h4
  - bennyelv 6y ago
    While that may be what some people use "Can't pay, we'll take it away" for, the programme is presented in quite a sympathetic way. Often the enforcement agents have empathy with the people they are enforcing against, particularly when it's clear that the person has a struggle that's no fault of their own. They're far less sympathetic to wealthier people who are just ignoring their responsibilities and trying to get away with it. At least that's how I remember the show, I haven't actually watched broadcast TV for at least 2 years now.
nailer 6y ago
You seem to be implying that the BBC is discriminating against working class people by showing people on benefits / being evicted. There are many working class people who are not on benefits or being evicted. You may wish to look for evidence of bias closer to home.

jonathanstrange 6y ago

BBC is awesome, their news is very good and they produce some of the best series in the world. It's a shame that they have split up BBC UK and BBC International so strictly and do everything they can to lock all BBC UK offerings to citizens of the UK. It infuriates me that I'm redirected from bbc.co.uk to bbc.com and are being displayed something else than people in the UK. If I go to bbc.co.uk, I do that to find out what Brits are seeing. My girlfriend would gladly pay for being able to access BBC UK series, but that's apparently impossible. They've made some horrible contracts with BBC International that seem to prohibit that. It makes no sense that she has to resort to illegal streaming even though she'd love to be a paying customer. Another problem is also that BBC International creates and distributes US productions that are far below their normal standards. So if you're looking for BBC nature documentaries, for instance, you have to manually sort out all those trashy international productions that are like National Geographic commercials. As I've said, it's a shame.

jannes 6y ago
Apparently there is a subscription service called BritBox - created by BBC and ITV, but it's only available in Australia, USA and Canada. https://www.britbox.com/ https://www.britbox.com/
- M2Ys4U 6y ago
  I expect that will be slowly expanded; the BBC's new Director-General wants to increase commercial revenue (and immediately before being appointed as DG he was the CEO of BBC Studios, the BBC's commercial subsidiary).
  - powderpig 6y ago
    The new chairman has apparently donated to the Tory party. https://bylinetimes.com/2021/01/06/new-bbc-chairman-richard-sharp-donated-more-than-400000-to-conservative-party/ https://bylinetimes.com/2021/01/06/new-bbc-chairman-richard-... The DG was also a former deputy chairman of Hammersmith and Fulham Conservative party. https://inews.co.uk/news/tim-davie-new-bbc-director-general-conservatives-reset-relations-downing-street-434450 https://inews.co.uk/news/tim-davie-new-bbc-director-general-...

DyslexicAtheist 6y ago

> Now I'm in Austria and the "content" on TV channels is just ridiculous. small demography of 9MM, so the only way to differentiate themselves against bigger German channels is to produce content specifically for that niche. Shows in Austria/CH only value-add are a "local dialect" of actors, or setting the plot/story within Austria/CH. Other than that it's either a poor local copy of German shows (which are often copies of international shows). Having been spoiled by British quality TV for a couple of decades I'd say the BBC is an incredible high yardstick, impossible to reach not just for Austria, but there is nothing like it in DACH. One of my biggest annoyance by far is the dubbing of OC into German. They have only a handful of voice-over actors who they rotate for these jobs so the lead-act of every other movie has the same voice[0]. As a child I thought one of the reasons Eddie Murphy was so funny was because of his incredibly high-pitched voice[1]. Once people sit through the dubbed content most of the meaning and jokes are lost. While other Europeans grow up watching things like Father Ted, Only Fools and Horses and such classics in their __original__ language, I have not 1 German-native friend who is able to follow English language on TV (even there are subs) and they will never get to appreciate other excellent shows like Norseman, Gomorrah, Suburra, because it's "too difficult to read the subs" and they didn't have to since they were kids. [0] Dennis Schmidt-Foß has given voices to Ryan Reynolds, Chris Evans, Eddie Murphy and others. In fact the situation with E Murphy was so bad/ridiculous that they decided to give him a _new_ voice!! That's right the same person now has a different voice and nobody thinks that's odd. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKGAOM0mAOo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKGAOM0mAOo

zwaps 6y ago
Germany has a considerably larger population than the UK, and the German public broadcasters are equally terrible as the one in Austria. Good series or programs produced by public television you can count on one hand. Literally. Indeed, they also invest most of their money in entertaining old people. This may be due to the aging population, but I'd rather assume it's good old grifting.

rsynnott 6y ago

> Benefits Britain: Life on the Dole This is by notorious awful tv station Channel 5, and is not paid for by the license fee. (In fairness, it's not amongst their most terrible content; about half of their programming amounts to "Look! Poor people! Haha!", and despite the name this isn't really an example of that.)

pbhjpbhj 6y ago

Benefits Britain is C5, not BBC, so it's not funded by licence fees. Indeed very few programmes appear to be made by the BBC. It seems like what happened/happens is that producers form their own private company, do the work for the BBC but the public don't get to keep the benefit of the work paid for the benefit gets locked away to provide private gains. Long running programmes are now made by third parties when they could easily be made by the BBC proper, Gardeners' Question Time, say. In part is to serve 'talent', but BBC's remit is to fill the gaps where commercial programmes don't go, to be distinctive, so they should never be paying £millions for a talk show host. If you're going to use public money then you should be benefiting the public as much as possible, not carefully twisting it to get private profits.

Mauricebranagh 6y ago
That was a political choice to increase competition it also means that more £ goes to the talent.

nebolo 6y ago

Austria has FM4, which is an amazing radio station and well worth license fee. ORF Sport is also pretty good.

pjc50 6y ago

> "Benefits Britain: Life on the Dole" This is the kind of TV program that I think has contributed to the UK's extreme stinginess and bureaucracy of benefits; in aggregate it's probably got people killed. Cherry-picking the most lurid stories to make people look bad. It's also not a BBC show, it's by Channel 5! I'm with a lot of people that the BBC can produce great stuff, but only when it remembers to be Reithian and the managers aren't looking. These days most of the BBC content I watch comes from BBC4, plus the output of David Attenborough. (ORF produce exactly one show with an international reputation: the New Year's Day concert from Vienna, which is lovely)