The bargain at the heart of the BBC is fraying

> they're leveraging their insane capital to succeed in areas they have no experience in.

This is nothing unique about Apple and Amazon, leveraging insane capital is the name of the game.

> I think linear TV will still be going in 10 years time, but probably not 30

I think you're probably right, but I'm one of the few millennials who will miss it when it's gone. I still like being able to turn on the news or some dumb show as background noise, it's an old habit from my boomer parent upbringing. I'm a bit surprised I haven't really met anyone else around my age with a nostalgic attachment to linear TV.

I stream things that I actually want to watch deliberately, but as a replacement for linear TV it's just not the same. It's a lot more effort (paradox of choice, beyond just the UI itself necessitating a lot more "clicks") and there's something nice about knowing that people around the country/world are watching the same thing at the same time as me. I'd like to say it could be a startup opportunity, but I think I might be the only one who cares.

Not to mention, currently an antenna will get you much better picture quality than many/most streaming services (definitely true for the BBC News stream available on iPlayer -- that looks like crap to me).

If I were forced to choose between Netflix and BBC's back catalog and current programming for the same price, I'd say that BBC comes out far ahead.

I like the original programming content the BBC produces. I don't like the BBC, and BBC news in particular, at all.

They propagate bias in insidious ways like 'creative' titling of articles, pushing articles off to side channels, and cutting HoC footage, all the while claiming impartiality. Their quality of their writing on the site has truly tanked in recent years, too.

And that's not to mention the harrassment of people who don't pay their license fee. Complain about Netflix's content all you want, at least they aren't lying about having signal detecting vans and sending threatening letters calling you a criminal. (To the non-Brits, the license fee is optional if you don't watch TV. But even if you tell them you don't have a TV, they'll send you letters every single month threatening you with court[1])

[1] http://www.bbctvlicence.com/

There are just so many things the BBC in its current form is doing wrong I don't know where to start:

    - Paying too much for too little (both quality *and* quantity of "talent")
    - Repeats, repeats and more goddam repeats in increasingly short timeframes
    - Recent actions such as putting Spitting Image on BritBox (paid commercial service), it should have been on license-paid TV ! I certainly refused to pay for it.  
    - Taking Political Correctness to extremes. Whether race, gender or disability it has become like *every* BBC programme has to fill a quota.  Don't get me wrong, diversity is important, but do you really have to cram every form of diversity into every single programme to the point where it starts feeling forced and artificial ?
    - Turning BBC News into a joke (newsreader reads summary, over to "our correspondent" who has been expensively transported to the scene to tell the viewer *the same thing*, then back to the studio for someone else on the BBC's payroll to tell the viewer *the same thing* again).

During the COVID lockdowns, I can probably count on one hand the number of hours of BBC programming I watched. Everything else came from Apple/Amazon/Netflix and perhaps one or two services.

If you want the BBC summarised in a nutshell, just look what happened when DoE died. They cleared their schedules across pretty much all TV and radio channels ... to broadcast the exact same mirrored content ... for god knows how many hours it was (48 ? 72 ?). Completely nuts. I mean one channel fine .... but the entirety of your major broadcast channels?