6 ms·

Won't argue with the your observation on consumption: I see the same with my children. However: there's nothing intrinsic to the BBC that requires linear deliv

Won't argue with the your observation on consumption: I see the same with my children. However: there's nothing intrinsic to the BBC that requires linear delivery or consumption. iPlayer was, after all, one of the first streaming services: a genuine bit of innovation from the Beeb. I dearly want to see the BBC not only survive, but to prosper. That may be rose-tinted/delusional/whatever. Why? Because it represents a collective service for society, by society. I don't watch all the content: not even some of the big stuff (Strictly). But I really value the breadth of content: that it caters to interests - people - that are diverse. It can do that because it doesn't have to slavishly chase advertising in a race-to-the-bottom death march to mediocrity. Similarly, its aspiration to impartial news coverage - to inform and educate, not impose a political doctrine - should be invaluable. It certainly hasn't always achieved that (and sometimes by a long way) but at least the aspiration is there. It would be greatly helped here by some structural protection from government meddling, but that's another story. Like the original article, I see the writing on the wall. But I don't think it needs to be a death spiral. In a world of hyper-targeted-advertising-driven-sensationalist-fact-free-fake-news in 140 characters or less, I want to believe there's a market for diverse, challenging society-enhancing content. I can't think of an organisation whose charter would better fit with that aim.

teamonkey 5y ago
> iPlayer was, after all, one of the first streaming services: a genuine bit of innovation from the Beeb. This is absolutely worth remembering, iPlayer was revelatory 12 or 13 years ago. Infuriatingly the innovation seems to have stopped there. Case in point, it's a corporation nearly 100 years old, yet its back catalogue is extremely poor. You should be able to watch every episode of Doctor Who on demand since the original black & white pilot, instead you're mainly limited to items shown in the last month, plus some randomly curated stuff. Channel 4 has a better online archive. When I lived outside of the UK I would have paid a subscription fee equal to the licence fee to gain access to iPlayer. It's worth paying for! But there's no way to give them money for services other than be a licence payer within the UK.
- deadbunny 5y ago
  > Case in point, it's a corporation nearly 100 years old, yet its back catalogue is extremely poor. This was due to the Competition Commission saying the BBC putting up their back catalogue would stifle competition.
  - chuckee 5y ago
    Sounds like internal sabotage.
- asdff 5y ago
  Isn't it because they don't physically have a lot of the back catalogue anymore? I read that they taped over a lot of shows and there aren't copies left for some.
- kmeisthax 5y ago
  >You should be able to watch every episode of Doctor Who on demand since the original black & white pilot I hate to break it to you, but not even the BBC has that. Most of their early work was never archived, as the technology to actually do so either didn't exist (television predates magnetic video recording), was so expensive as to make full archival prohibitively expensive, or was explicitly prohibited by contractual arrangement. No, seriously, TV actors insisted that tapes were wiped and reused after a period of time so that reruns would not usurp the market for new productions. The same goes for a lot of other countries' early television. Just finding working copies of all of those Doctor Who episodes is an ongoing preservation project. Things like not being able to pay for iPlayer outside of the license fee is a similar problem - politics dictating the market. The BBC's license-funded activities are specifically firewalled from the part of the business that sells commercial TV internationally. Even if that particular diktat didn't exist, the BBC would still be following the ordinary TV business practice of selling each show off on a per-country basis. Even the big streaming services do this with their own originals, many of which are not streaming-exclusive outside the US. The idea that you have a single "owner" that just does everything and sells the work globally is mostly unheard of outside of the videogame industry.
  - deleted 5y ago
native_samples 5y ago
There's a difference between aspiration and execution. Every TV channel will claim they aspire to inform, educate and be diverse. No TV channel in history has said their goal is to misinform, dumb down and present homogenous uniformity day after day. The BBC is clearly failing at its goals. Most of the UK population no longer trusts its news output; that's huge and a new phenomenon, although of course it's been a long time in coming. Unlike normal TV companies the BBC cannot receive a reality check from the market because people are forced to fund it, so there's no way to break the downward spiral. It just gets worse, every year. Indeed it would be sensible to argue that the BBC's problem is too little government interference, not too much. The government is, at least in theory, accountable to the people. Sure, it's only every 4 years and many different issues are conflated together. But there is at least a vote. The BBC is accountable to nobody. It's not accountable to its viewers. It's not accountable to elected representatives. It is not even really accountable to Ofcom, given the incredibly weak enforcement of the vaguely worded regulations on fairness and neutrality. If you have a complaint about the BBC you can complain to, well, the BBC itself. Or you could complain to an MP who will do nothing because the BBC is de-facto independent of the government. If the BBC were actually controlled by the government then it would have already been forced back to more mainstream political views. The ruling party is very unhappy with the BBC's wokeness and openly biased news (e.g. "Brexit threat to sandwiches" being a memorable headline). That unhappyness is not self-serving politics but rather, reflecting the frustration that their voters are telling both them and opinion pollsters. The public no longer perceives the BBC as "society enhancing" but instead society damaging. Yet, they can do nothing about it. The political will to reform the BBC isn't there.
- eynsham 5y ago
  > The BBC is clearly failing at its goals. Well, the Proms this year were bound to be disappointing, but I’m sure matters will improve next year. And the cricket commentary is still perfectly sound. > Most of the UK population no longer trusts its news output This is simply untrue: >60% of the population trust the BBC’s news output.¹ > The government is, at least in theory, accountable to the people. It is less accountable when the public broadcaster is under its thumb. This is how e.g. Orban stays in power, and it’s not healthy regardless of the ideology of the person in power. > Sure, it's only every 4 years and many different issues are conflated together. Four years? It sounds like you’re rather unfamiliar with the UK. > The BBC is accountable to nobody The BBC survives because it is popular. Like any Quango or government body, it can be abolished by an act of parliament. If it is special, it is worth asking why it is special—and the most obvious answer is that people like it. You also ignore that there are mechanisms other than accountability to ensure that people do things—institutions can have a culture. All your criticisms could be applied to the UK judiciary, yet its culture precludes certain behaviours that e.g. the prospect of removal from office alone cannot explain. > If the BBC were actually controlled by the government then it would have already been forced back to more mainstream political views. It is amusingly naïve to think that that would be the only response. I prefer having fair elections and avoiding entrenching one party rule to whatever non-mainstream views the BBC propagates. > BBC's wokeness and openly biased news (e.g. "Brexit threat to sandwiches" being a memorable headline) Is that really ‘woke and openly biased’? It’s not that implausible that something in the supply chain is affected by Brexit. The Conservatives, like governments of all stripes, are unhappy with the BBC because it is not in total agreement with government policy, has (excepting a commitment to democracy and human rights) no official stance in the first place making agreement or disagreement with policy something of a category error, and is not entirely under its thumb. That alone isn’t very good evidence of ‘wokeness and open bias’. > The public no longer perceives the BBC as "society enhancing" but instead society damaging. Yet, they can do nothing about it. The political will to reform the BBC isn't there. If turning the BBC into a UK version of CCTV were a popular policy, Boris Johnson would not shy away from it: cf. Brexit. Polling clearly indicates that you are wrong and the BBC is still quite popular: this is far more consistent with the evidence than some mysterious unwillingness to impose the will of Number 10 on the BBC. 1: https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/2021/united-kingdom https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-repo...

teamonkey 5y ago

> iPlayer was, after all, one of the first streaming services: a genuine bit of innovation from the Beeb. This is absolutely worth remembering, iPlayer was revelatory 12 or 13 years ago. Infuriatingly the innovation seems to have stopped there. Case in point, it's a corporation nearly 100 years old, yet its back catalogue is extremely poor. You should be able to watch every episode of Doctor Who on demand since the original black & white pilot, instead you're mainly limited to items shown in the last month, plus some randomly curated stuff. Channel 4 has a better online archive. When I lived outside of the UK I would have paid a subscription fee equal to the licence fee to gain access to iPlayer. It's worth paying for! But there's no way to give them money for services other than be a licence payer within the UK.

deadbunny 5y ago
> Case in point, it's a corporation nearly 100 years old, yet its back catalogue is extremely poor. This was due to the Competition Commission saying the BBC putting up their back catalogue would stifle competition.
- chuckee 5y ago
  Sounds like internal sabotage.
asdff 5y ago
Isn't it because they don't physically have a lot of the back catalogue anymore? I read that they taped over a lot of shows and there aren't copies left for some.
kmeisthax 5y ago
>You should be able to watch every episode of Doctor Who on demand since the original black & white pilot I hate to break it to you, but not even the BBC has that. Most of their early work was never archived, as the technology to actually do so either didn't exist (television predates magnetic video recording), was so expensive as to make full archival prohibitively expensive, or was explicitly prohibited by contractual arrangement. No, seriously, TV actors insisted that tapes were wiped and reused after a period of time so that reruns would not usurp the market for new productions. The same goes for a lot of other countries' early television. Just finding working copies of all of those Doctor Who episodes is an ongoing preservation project. Things like not being able to pay for iPlayer outside of the license fee is a similar problem - politics dictating the market. The BBC's license-funded activities are specifically firewalled from the part of the business that sells commercial TV internationally. Even if that particular diktat didn't exist, the BBC would still be following the ordinary TV business practice of selling each show off on a per-country basis. Even the big streaming services do this with their own originals, many of which are not streaming-exclusive outside the US. The idea that you have a single "owner" that just does everything and sells the work globally is mostly unheard of outside of the videogame industry.
- deleted 5y ago

native_samples 5y ago

There's a difference between aspiration and execution. Every TV channel will claim they aspire to inform, educate and be diverse. No TV channel in history has said their goal is to misinform, dumb down and present homogenous uniformity day after day. The BBC is clearly failing at its goals. Most of the UK population no longer trusts its news output; that's huge and a new phenomenon, although of course it's been a long time in coming. Unlike normal TV companies the BBC cannot receive a reality check from the market because people are forced to fund it, so there's no way to break the downward spiral. It just gets worse, every year. Indeed it would be sensible to argue that the BBC's problem is too little government interference, not too much. The government is, at least in theory, accountable to the people. Sure, it's only every 4 years and many different issues are conflated together. But there is at least a vote. The BBC is accountable to nobody. It's not accountable to its viewers. It's not accountable to elected representatives. It is not even really accountable to Ofcom, given the incredibly weak enforcement of the vaguely worded regulations on fairness and neutrality. If you have a complaint about the BBC you can complain to, well, the BBC itself. Or you could complain to an MP who will do nothing because the BBC is de-facto independent of the government. If the BBC were actually controlled by the government then it would have already been forced back to more mainstream political views. The ruling party is very unhappy with the BBC's wokeness and openly biased news (e.g. "Brexit threat to sandwiches" being a memorable headline). That unhappyness is not self-serving politics but rather, reflecting the frustration that their voters are telling both them and opinion pollsters. The public no longer perceives the BBC as "society enhancing" but instead society damaging. Yet, they can do nothing about it. The political will to reform the BBC isn't there.

eynsham 5y ago
> The BBC is clearly failing at its goals. Well, the Proms this year were bound to be disappointing, but I’m sure matters will improve next year. And the cricket commentary is still perfectly sound. > Most of the UK population no longer trusts its news output This is simply untrue: >60% of the population trust the BBC’s news output.¹ > The government is, at least in theory, accountable to the people. It is less accountable when the public broadcaster is under its thumb. This is how e.g. Orban stays in power, and it’s not healthy regardless of the ideology of the person in power. > Sure, it's only every 4 years and many different issues are conflated together. Four years? It sounds like you’re rather unfamiliar with the UK. > The BBC is accountable to nobody The BBC survives because it is popular. Like any Quango or government body, it can be abolished by an act of parliament. If it is special, it is worth asking why it is special—and the most obvious answer is that people like it. You also ignore that there are mechanisms other than accountability to ensure that people do things—institutions can have a culture. All your criticisms could be applied to the UK judiciary, yet its culture precludes certain behaviours that e.g. the prospect of removal from office alone cannot explain. > If the BBC were actually controlled by the government then it would have already been forced back to more mainstream political views. It is amusingly naïve to think that that would be the only response. I prefer having fair elections and avoiding entrenching one party rule to whatever non-mainstream views the BBC propagates. > BBC's wokeness and openly biased news (e.g. "Brexit threat to sandwiches" being a memorable headline) Is that really ‘woke and openly biased’? It’s not that implausible that something in the supply chain is affected by Brexit. The Conservatives, like governments of all stripes, are unhappy with the BBC because it is not in total agreement with government policy, has (excepting a commitment to democracy and human rights) no official stance in the first place making agreement or disagreement with policy something of a category error, and is not entirely under its thumb. That alone isn’t very good evidence of ‘wokeness and open bias’. > The public no longer perceives the BBC as "society enhancing" but instead society damaging. Yet, they can do nothing about it. The political will to reform the BBC isn't there. If turning the BBC into a UK version of CCTV were a popular policy, Boris Johnson would not shy away from it: cf. Brexit. Polling clearly indicates that you are wrong and the BBC is still quite popular: this is far more consistent with the evidence than some mysterious unwillingness to impose the will of Number 10 on the BBC. 1: https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/2021/united-kingdom https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-repo...