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I think the funding and governance (by Royal Charter) of the BBC have historically provided a huge benefit to society in the UK. Advertising free children’s TV

I think the funding and governance (by Royal Charter) of the BBC have historically provided a huge benefit to society in the UK. Advertising free children’s TV (and radio) may have delayed the onset or rampant consumerism fuelled by commercial TV elsewhere. The BBC microcomputer project is arguably the origin of ARM CPU’s. Initially the license fee was for radios, I can’t find a reference but I remember being told as a child that politicians saw the risks of radio propaganda and legislated to mandate broadcast media to be politically unbiased . It’s interesting seeing suggestions on the recent threads about EU funding for a WhatsApp alternative - perhaps the license fee could also fund the infrastructure for something like signal. What is absolutely clear from history is commercial media outlets fuel political bias, and it seems to be increasingly damaging to society. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_United_Kingdom_(historical) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_...

cheph 6y ago
> perhaps the license fee could also fund the infrastructure for something like signal Why like signal? Signal has no protections to avoid the same abuse as WhatsApp. While I would agree with the sentiment, I think that if EU funds anything it will just as likely be much worse than WhatsApp than better than it given their track record (e.g. stupid popups on every damn website that makes life just that extra bit worse). But there is some hope in that both the french and German governments have adopted Matrix. The benefit of this manner of funding (through adoption and payment for actual services) is that there is actually a customer/provider relationship - and the potential for more direct feedback. That way if it totally sucks you don't end up with a situation where the people authorizing payment/funding are not affected by how badly it sucks.
- flower-giraffe 6y ago
  > Why like signal? Signal has no protections to avoid the same abuse as WhatsApp. I think something like signal could reasonably have sufficient protections from both a technical and legislative perspective. And for that matter matrix too. I was not intending to highlight signal as the only possibility, by like signal I guess I meant a small a capable organisation with a clear non profit agenda.
  - cheph 6y ago
    Signal is centralized by design. If they redesign it sure, it can be something that is not centralized by design, but the problem is then it is hardly an open standard, because it is entirely up to whoever is running Signal.
afavour 6y ago
Strongly agreed. Having lived in the US for a good number of years now I can see how the idea of vans roaming looking for TV viewers is baffling, but the public TV offering by the BBC, while definitely not perfect, is miles ahead of both the public and network offerings on US TV (though credit to the likes of PBS and NPR for doing miraculous work with a fraction of the budget!). I even got my start in computing from the BBC Micro machines at school.
- YinglingLight 6y ago
  Oy open up! Do you have a licence for that telly?
- ouid 6y ago
  Then pay for it with taxes on sales of television sets themselves.
  - VonGuard 6y ago
    This.
  - afavour 6y ago
    Pay for a recurring service via a one-off payment? What could go wrong?! Aside from that, a TV license is £157 a year. Let's say a TV lasts three years (which feels conservative, pretty sure I had my last TV for eight), you'd need to get the buyer to pay an extra £471 when they purchase their TV. How is front-loading such a payment in the interests of the viewer? Not to mention you don't have to pay the fee if you're only watching streaming services like Netflix.
    - mandelbrotwurst 6y ago
      You can set the rate of the tax to account for the time value of money, charging less up front than you would for the sum total of the subscription over the life of the device. You could argue that increasing the up front cost is a regressive tax, but you should be able to more than make up for that by not needing to pay fleets of trucks to drive around all day looking to find TV tax scofflaws.
api 6y ago
On advertising and consumerism: we may be seeing that come back around. My kids have only watched Amazon Prime, Netflix, etc. and have barely ever seen an ad. We've banned YouTube for multiple reasons.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  The ads just moved directly into the shows and storylines for Amazon Prime and Netflix (and most everyone else).
  - criddell 6y ago
    Has anything really changed? There have always been kids programming that was primarily about selling toys. I'm thinking of Care Bears, GI Joe, Transforms, Voltron, etc... When shows like that move to Netflix or Amazon Prime the native ads remain, but the interstitials are gone.
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      That’s true. I guess as an adult, I feel like I notice it more when the writing / photography blatantly and inorganically bring logos and certain products to the forefront. A family member’s kids were watching a Christmas movie on Netflix, and while I wasn’t watching it, something jarring hit my ears. In the middle of the movie, Santa names the brand and model of a car, and then starts listing its specs as he gets into a car chase and praises its features. A literal car ad built right into the movie.
      - Mauricebranagh 6y ago
        Pay for placement is common in the USA and in films also why you don't often see baddies using apple products.
        lotsofpulp 6y ago
        There’s placement, and then there’s altering the storyline and photography of a scene to achieve the goal of advertising a product. For example, there’s a difference in someone drinking a can of Coke, versus someone spending 30 seconds talking about how they love Coke, and adjusting the camera angles so that the Coke logo is always front and center. It’s possible to do product placement that doesn’t take you out of the story. But recent stuff beats you over the head with it in ways that are inconsistent with normal behavior and it’s jarring, takes you out of the moment, and I have no idea how people tolerate it.
permo-w 6y ago
The BBC also essentially invented online TV streaming services. Netflix credits BBC iPlayer as being their inspiration to move online like they did
scotty79 6y ago
I wonder if people will ever notice how socially and psychologically toxic is advertisement business and regulate it stringently.
- faceplanted 6y ago
  People have clearly noticed the social and political issues with advertising for a very long time now. The issue is that it's hard to rally against one of the most lucrative businesses ever to exist that inherently has an extreme amount of messaging power to defend itself.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    I think the issue is people really like watching TV and movies, and continuing to watch the content shows they are OK with all the ads. Never have people had more access to other content, or other ways of entertaining themselves. I have no idea how people put up with the NFL in the US.
    - staplers 6y ago
      During the early days of sports streaming (sometimes still) you'd find a stream with a live feed of the stadium broadcast without the ads. During the commercial breaks you'd be able to watch what was on the megatron (camera panning crowd, in-stadium entertainment). I would pay a massive premium to have access to that feed for every sports broadcast. Gabe Newell said it best about piracy offering the best experience.
  - ballenf 6y ago
    It's also worth noting that advertising is nearly a necessity in an industrialized society. Production of goods has high capital upfront costs and marginal costs that become negligible at scale. You can't get that scale without advertising or a government-mandated monopoly. Or, at least, you can't get that scale quickly enough.
    - scotty79 6y ago
laurent92 6y ago
> What is absolutely clear from history is commercial media outlets fuel political bias, and it seems to be increasingly damaging to society. Public broadcasting fuels political division a lot. The most worrying is that you don’t notice it. It is increasingly worrying because when people are exposed to the other side, they immediately « catch fire », wonder why they have been lied to, and never trust public broadcasting anymore. With luck, they may smoothen their beliefs a bit later in life, for the most centrist ones. To me, public TV, especially BBC, shouldn’t be one-sided as it is now.
- thesuitonym 6y ago
  >It is increasingly worrying because when people are exposed to the other side, they immediately « catch fire », wonder why they have been lied to, and never trust public broadcasting anymore. Compare this to people who watch commercial TV, see an opposing view, and immediately wonder why they're currently being lied to, and go back to trusting their single source of commercial programming.
- Silhouette 6y ago
  The thing with the BBC is that people on both sides of the political spectrum claim it's biased towards the other guys. That at least suggests that its overall balance is relatively neutral, even if specific individual programmes it broadcasts may not be. I do feel that in recent times, the BBC's big name current affairs programmes have often given politicians of all parties an easy time in interviews, which I think is more worrying as a trend. I think the BBC should still challenge government representatives to explain and if necessary defend their policies, and should also still challenge the Opposition and smaller parties when their own representatives make dubious claims even if they're not currently in power to implement them.
  - throwaway3699 6y ago
    I think BBC is biased towards the establishment, not left or right.
    - 6y ago
richardARPANET 6y ago
The BBC is a propaganda arm of the state, IMO they should be defunded significantly.
- Spivak 6y ago
  Would you say that about all state funded news or is the BBC uniquely worse?
willtim 6y ago
While I think that having some publicly funded radio/TV is a really good thing, the idea of the UK TV license and the subsequent enforcement is not. My friends elderly mother does not have or want a TV. She is constantly harassed and threatened by UK license enforcement. Her son has invited them into her home on numerous occasions, hoping that the legal threats and visits would cease, but to this day they have not. I object to having my license fee money spent on such abuse of vulnerable people.
- seanhunter 6y ago
  Yeah. My father in law had the same experience. He once took an enforcement person into his house and insisted they go through the house together and conduct an exhaustive search of all the places a TV could be. "Perhaps it's in the cistern of the toilet? Let's look!...Not there? Perhaps it's in the bread bin..." etc etc It is really bad the way they do this, and having seen the threatening letters they send out they could be very frightening. The letters were on the lines of "Our detectors have found that you have a TV and you have to pay the license fee or we'll send bailiffs around, take you to court etc", and the one I received once (when i too didn't have a TV) was printed on red paper.
  - 908B64B197 6y ago
    Can you imagine having someone harassing an elderly person to get in house without a warrant here in America? And that person to be paid and hired as a civil servant, in a completely unionized job with a pension fund? If that's not the definition of a job program and how the welfare state has gone wrong I don't know what is.
    - willtim 6y ago
      I suspect the issue is partly caused by outsourcing the enforcement to private contractors and setting targets!
      - 908B64B197 6y ago
reallydontask 6y ago
> Advertising free children’s TV (and radio) may have delayed the onset or rampant consumerism fuelled by commercial TV elsewhere. I find this statement hard to square with the make up of the economy of this country and the rampant consumerism that seems to exist. We seem to have taken the biggest hit to the economy by covid because our economy depends so much on rampant consumerism (I'm obviously simplifying) This is not to say that I think ad free TV is bad, quite the opposite.

cheph 6y ago

> perhaps the license fee could also fund the infrastructure for something like signal Why like signal? Signal has no protections to avoid the same abuse as WhatsApp. While I would agree with the sentiment, I think that if EU funds anything it will just as likely be much worse than WhatsApp than better than it given their track record (e.g. stupid popups on every damn website that makes life just that extra bit worse). But there is some hope in that both the french and German governments have adopted Matrix. The benefit of this manner of funding (through adoption and payment for actual services) is that there is actually a customer/provider relationship - and the potential for more direct feedback. That way if it totally sucks you don't end up with a situation where the people authorizing payment/funding are not affected by how badly it sucks.

flower-giraffe 6y ago
> Why like signal? Signal has no protections to avoid the same abuse as WhatsApp. I think something like signal could reasonably have sufficient protections from both a technical and legislative perspective. And for that matter matrix too. I was not intending to highlight signal as the only possibility, by like signal I guess I meant a small a capable organisation with a clear non profit agenda.
- cheph 6y ago
  Signal is centralized by design. If they redesign it sure, it can be something that is not centralized by design, but the problem is then it is hardly an open standard, because it is entirely up to whoever is running Signal.

afavour 6y ago

Strongly agreed. Having lived in the US for a good number of years now I can see how the idea of vans roaming looking for TV viewers is baffling, but the public TV offering by the BBC, while definitely not perfect, is miles ahead of both the public and network offerings on US TV (though credit to the likes of PBS and NPR for doing miraculous work with a fraction of the budget!). I even got my start in computing from the BBC Micro machines at school.

YinglingLight 6y ago
Oy open up! Do you have a licence for that telly?
ouid 6y ago
Then pay for it with taxes on sales of television sets themselves.
- VonGuard 6y ago
  This.
- afavour 6y ago
  Pay for a recurring service via a one-off payment? What could go wrong?! Aside from that, a TV license is £157 a year. Let's say a TV lasts three years (which feels conservative, pretty sure I had my last TV for eight), you'd need to get the buyer to pay an extra £471 when they purchase their TV. How is front-loading such a payment in the interests of the viewer? Not to mention you don't have to pay the fee if you're only watching streaming services like Netflix.
  - mandelbrotwurst 6y ago
    You can set the rate of the tax to account for the time value of money, charging less up front than you would for the sum total of the subscription over the life of the device. You could argue that increasing the up front cost is a regressive tax, but you should be able to more than make up for that by not needing to pay fleets of trucks to drive around all day looking to find TV tax scofflaws.

api 6y ago

On advertising and consumerism: we may be seeing that come back around. My kids have only watched Amazon Prime, Netflix, etc. and have barely ever seen an ad. We've banned YouTube for multiple reasons.

lotsofpulp 6y ago
The ads just moved directly into the shows and storylines for Amazon Prime and Netflix (and most everyone else).
- criddell 6y ago
  Has anything really changed? There have always been kids programming that was primarily about selling toys. I'm thinking of Care Bears, GI Joe, Transforms, Voltron, etc... When shows like that move to Netflix or Amazon Prime the native ads remain, but the interstitials are gone.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    That’s true. I guess as an adult, I feel like I notice it more when the writing / photography blatantly and inorganically bring logos and certain products to the forefront. A family member’s kids were watching a Christmas movie on Netflix, and while I wasn’t watching it, something jarring hit my ears. In the middle of the movie, Santa names the brand and model of a car, and then starts listing its specs as he gets into a car chase and praises its features. A literal car ad built right into the movie.
    - Mauricebranagh 6y ago
      Pay for placement is common in the USA and in films also why you don't often see baddies using apple products.
      - lotsofpulp 6y ago
        There’s placement, and then there’s altering the storyline and photography of a scene to achieve the goal of advertising a product. For example, there’s a difference in someone drinking a can of Coke, versus someone spending 30 seconds talking about how they love Coke, and adjusting the camera angles so that the Coke logo is always front and center. It’s possible to do product placement that doesn’t take you out of the story. But recent stuff beats you over the head with it in ways that are inconsistent with normal behavior and it’s jarring, takes you out of the moment, and I have no idea how people tolerate it.

permo-w 6y ago

The BBC also essentially invented online TV streaming services. Netflix credits BBC iPlayer as being their inspiration to move online like they did

scotty79 6y ago

I wonder if people will ever notice how socially and psychologically toxic is advertisement business and regulate it stringently.

faceplanted 6y ago
People have clearly noticed the social and political issues with advertising for a very long time now. The issue is that it's hard to rally against one of the most lucrative businesses ever to exist that inherently has an extreme amount of messaging power to defend itself.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  I think the issue is people really like watching TV and movies, and continuing to watch the content shows they are OK with all the ads. Never have people had more access to other content, or other ways of entertaining themselves. I have no idea how people put up with the NFL in the US.
  - staplers 6y ago
    During the early days of sports streaming (sometimes still) you'd find a stream with a live feed of the stadium broadcast without the ads. During the commercial breaks you'd be able to watch what was on the megatron (camera panning crowd, in-stadium entertainment). I would pay a massive premium to have access to that feed for every sports broadcast. Gabe Newell said it best about piracy offering the best experience.
- ballenf 6y ago
  It's also worth noting that advertising is nearly a necessity in an industrialized society. Production of goods has high capital upfront costs and marginal costs that become negligible at scale. You can't get that scale without advertising or a government-mandated monopoly. Or, at least, you can't get that scale quickly enough.
  - scotty79 6y ago

laurent92 6y ago

> What is absolutely clear from history is commercial media outlets fuel political bias, and it seems to be increasingly damaging to society. Public broadcasting fuels political division a lot. The most worrying is that you don’t notice it. It is increasingly worrying because when people are exposed to the other side, they immediately « catch fire », wonder why they have been lied to, and never trust public broadcasting anymore. With luck, they may smoothen their beliefs a bit later in life, for the most centrist ones. To me, public TV, especially BBC, shouldn’t be one-sided as it is now.

thesuitonym 6y ago
>It is increasingly worrying because when people are exposed to the other side, they immediately « catch fire », wonder why they have been lied to, and never trust public broadcasting anymore. Compare this to people who watch commercial TV, see an opposing view, and immediately wonder why they're currently being lied to, and go back to trusting their single source of commercial programming.
Silhouette 6y ago
The thing with the BBC is that people on both sides of the political spectrum claim it's biased towards the other guys. That at least suggests that its overall balance is relatively neutral, even if specific individual programmes it broadcasts may not be. I do feel that in recent times, the BBC's big name current affairs programmes have often given politicians of all parties an easy time in interviews, which I think is more worrying as a trend. I think the BBC should still challenge government representatives to explain and if necessary defend their policies, and should also still challenge the Opposition and smaller parties when their own representatives make dubious claims even if they're not currently in power to implement them.
- throwaway3699 6y ago
  I think BBC is biased towards the establishment, not left or right.
  - 6y ago

richardARPANET 6y ago

The BBC is a propaganda arm of the state, IMO they should be defunded significantly.

Spivak 6y ago
Would you say that about all state funded news or is the BBC uniquely worse?

willtim 6y ago

While I think that having some publicly funded radio/TV is a really good thing, the idea of the UK TV license and the subsequent enforcement is not. My friends elderly mother does not have or want a TV. She is constantly harassed and threatened by UK license enforcement. Her son has invited them into her home on numerous occasions, hoping that the legal threats and visits would cease, but to this day they have not. I object to having my license fee money spent on such abuse of vulnerable people.

seanhunter 6y ago
Yeah. My father in law had the same experience. He once took an enforcement person into his house and insisted they go through the house together and conduct an exhaustive search of all the places a TV could be. "Perhaps it's in the cistern of the toilet? Let's look!...Not there? Perhaps it's in the bread bin..." etc etc It is really bad the way they do this, and having seen the threatening letters they send out they could be very frightening. The letters were on the lines of "Our detectors have found that you have a TV and you have to pay the license fee or we'll send bailiffs around, take you to court etc", and the one I received once (when i too didn't have a TV) was printed on red paper.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  Can you imagine having someone harassing an elderly person to get in house without a warrant here in America? And that person to be paid and hired as a civil servant, in a completely unionized job with a pension fund? If that's not the definition of a job program and how the welfare state has gone wrong I don't know what is.
  - willtim 6y ago
    I suspect the issue is partly caused by outsourcing the enforcement to private contractors and setting targets!
    - 908B64B197 6y ago

reallydontask 6y ago

> Advertising free children’s TV (and radio) may have delayed the onset or rampant consumerism fuelled by commercial TV elsewhere. I find this statement hard to square with the make up of the economy of this country and the rampant consumerism that seems to exist. We seem to have taken the biggest hit to the economy by covid because our economy depends so much on rampant consumerism (I'm obviously simplifying) This is not to say that I think ad free TV is bad, quite the opposite.