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The bargain at the heart of the BBC is fraying

jamesomalley.substack.com

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Re: The bargain at the heart of the BBC is fraying

#81

Post by jodrellblank »

908B64B197 wrote: post #69
iso1210 wrote: post #16

My kids have no concept of linear TV. My 9 year old came back and told me that a friend had a broken TV as when they turned it on, the program was already half way through. Their 'channels' are netflix, amazon and disney. When I had the choice and they were pre-school then sure, we watched things like Alphablocks on iplayer. I can force them to watch Attenborough or Blue Peter, and they enjoy it, just not enough to w…

> Their 'channels' are netflix, amazon and disney. When I had the choice and they were pre-school then sure, we watched things like Alphablocks on iplayer. I can force them to watch Attenborough or Blue Peter, and they enjoy it, just not enough to want to watch them over things on disney. There's so much competition of things to do. > This itself might not say a lot, and I still have a TV license despite the limited…

This feels like saying "why not get rid of government funded schools and have children watch Marvel and Disney instead?". The BBC's mission was to "inform, educate and entertain", Disney's and Marvels is more like "entertain, addict and profit". From Wikipedia about the origins of the BBC:

> "The British Broadcasting Corporation came into existence on 1 January 1927, and Reith – newly knighted – was appointed its first Director General.[...] British radio audiences had little choice apart from the upscale programming of the BBC. Reith, an intensely moralistic executive, was in full charge. His goal was to broadcast "All that is best in every department of human knowledge, endeavour and achievement.... The preservation of a high moral tone is obviously of paramount importance." Reith succeeded in building a high wall against an American-style free-for-all in radio in which the goal was to attract the largest audiences and thereby secure the greatest advertising revenue. There was no paid advertising on the BBC; all the revenue came from a tax on receiving sets. Highbrow audiences, however, greatly enjoyed it. At a time when American, Australian and Canadian stations were drawing huge audiences cheering for their local teams with the broadcast of baseball, rugby and hockey, the BBC emphasised service for a national rather than a regional audience. Boat races were well covered along with tennis and horse racing, but the BBC was reluctant to spend its severely limited air time on long football or cricket games, regardless of their popularity."

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC#1927_to_1939

Americans will hate the state telling them what to watch for their own good, many Britons don't like the way it's the Oxbridge upper classes telling the rest of us what to watch, but regardless of that there was some attempt to be more than just entertainment, some values other than ad revenue. Has Marvel, Disney or Netflix made a Tomorrow's World, a Blue Peter, or anything like the Reith Lectures ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reith_Lecture ) ?

Re: The bargain at the heart of the BBC is fraying

#82

Post by zimpenfish »

nerdawson wrote: post #79
iso1210 wrote: post #16

My kids have no concept of linear TV. My 9 year old came back and told me that a friend had a broken TV as when they turned it on, the program was already half way through. Their 'channels' are netflix, amazon and disney. When I had the choice and they were pre-school then sure, we watched things like Alphablocks on iplayer. I can force them to watch Attenborough or Blue Peter, and they enjoy it, just not enough to w…

Euro 2020 only reinforced how important the BBC actually is. iPlayer were streaming matches in 4K HDR while ITV were pumping out shockingly poor resolution low frame rate content that was barely watchable. Hard to believe that ITV were the ones with commercial funding behind them. Seeing that a match was going to be aired on ITV filled me with dread.

> while ITV were pumping out shockingly poor resolution low frame rate content that was barely watchable.

Don't forget the adverts and the several occasions when their streaming servers just plain couldn't be arsed to deliver any data to people during important games.

Re: The bargain at the heart of the BBC is fraying

#83

Post by msla »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #51
wyager wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re being downvoted but I think this is a fair question. I don’t accept this assertion as true at face value. Presumably the BBC, as with any other government-controlled revenue source, acts as some sort of patronage mechanism, and a lot of these roles exist as a jobs program rather than something the taxpayers actually extract a benefit from.

> The BBC, as with any other government-controlled revenue source Point of fact, the BBC was not intended to be "government-controlled", and it is not a "revenue source" for the UK government. https://www.quora.com/Is-the-BBC-the-state-owned-and-state-c... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC#

The BBC is government-controlled in that its money is collected by the government, which can punish people for not paying, and organizations know where their funds are coming from and attempt to prevent those funds from being stopped.

Re: The bargain at the heart of the BBC is fraying

#84

Post by seccess »

"Instead, they’ll be reminiscing about watching a Twitch streaming millionaire child screaming racial slurs as he rail-guns his opponents on Fortnite."

This perspective is reductive and insulting. There are many great, wholesome creators on YT/Twitch who put a lot of work to make their content welcoming and intellectually engaging, even if they are seemingly just playing video games. Just because the author doesn't like it doesn't make this remotely accurate to the real world.

Re: The bargain at the heart of the BBC is fraying

#85

Post by asdff »

teamonkey wrote: post #62
spinningslate wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 o…

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.

Re: The bargain at the heart of the BBC is fraying

#86

Post by richardjennings »

I believe that the BBC can provide value for money and remain relevant if and only if there is an internal recognition that any competition they face as an organisation is against the best social value that a public broadcasting utility can provide. Any notion of commercial competition needs to be squashed.

Re: The bargain at the heart of the BBC is fraying

#87

Post by asdff »

iso1210 wrote: post #71
MattPalmer1086 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with all of that. Streaming is about choice, but linear TV is about an event and/or serendipity. I have a lot of movies on Plex, but when we browse them it's rare for us to select one. On the other hand, we often watch those movies when they're on TV. "We have that on Plex" has become a household joke.

Netflix have a "watch something" button. I've never used it, but I assume it's there to match the serendipity aspect. Amazon I think have a "watch party" feature, but that's not the same as 10 million people all watching Mr Blobby get gunged. There seemed to be a small amount of cultural "togetherness" with the guy doing the PE (Joe Someone?) during lockdown, not sure as I didn't watch it (too busy working). But yes,…

The problem with the watch something button is that its not truly doing what linear TV did. Linear TV was still programming. You settled on a channel that you knew was going to have decent enough stuff on at the time. You hit "watch something" on netflix and it might pull, best case, stuff from all over my watch history with no particular rhyme or reason, when really what I want is to throw on adult swim for an aqua teen hunger force marathon interspersed with similar content like that. The big advantage of some of these older networks was that I trusted their curation. If a station like MTV saw that Jackass was a popular show, they would give me a four hour Jackass marathon sometime this week and I'd probably have it on. I don't trust netflix's curation on the other hand. I'm honestly on the hunt for some live streams of 2000s era cable channels and watching that.

Re: The bargain at the heart of the BBC is fraying

#88

Post by kmeisthax »

teamonkey wrote: post #62
spinningslate wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 o…

>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.

Re: The bargain at the heart of the BBC is fraying

#89

Post by iso1210 »

wazoox wrote: post #68
iso1210 wrote: post #16

My kids have no concept of linear TV. My 9 year old came back and told me that a friend had a broken TV as when they turned it on, the program was already half way through. Their 'channels' are netflix, amazon and disney. When I had the choice and they were pre-school then sure, we watched things like Alphablocks on iplayer. I can force them to watch Attenborough or Blue Peter, and they enjoy it, just not enough to w…

The main problem with the BBC is that too much of its nice content isn't available out of the UK. I see no reason why it couldn't be watched all around the world.

Rights issues, and of course the fact that BBC content is -- a fair whack of BBC funding comes from Worldwide (or whatever it's called this week), which sells BBC material internationally. Watch a BBC production on CBS or PBS or BBS or whatever and some money goes back to the BBC. I believe Britbox is an option too.

Same with television formats. Dancing with the Stars I believe is a popular US program based on a BBC show, the format has been licensed to half the planet.

Re: The bargain at the heart of the BBC is fraying

#90

Post by echelon »

whimsicalism wrote: post #41
echelon wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's insane to me that Apple and Amazon are making movies. How many things are companies allowed to do? They're clearly making it harder for other players in these markets, and they're leveraging their insane capital to succeed in areas they have no experience in. It's also incredibly annoying now that there are a dozen different subscription services, each with different apps and radically different navigation UX, a…

> 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.

It's wildly anticompetitive.

And let's not forget that this isn't strictly about movies, but the broader concept of attention.

The giants are paying to keep attention on their platforms, and they're doing it in every vertical they can possibly enter. This makes it hard for other industries to compete for that same attention as they don't have the claws and meat hooks that the trillionaire famgopolies do.

How does MGM compete? They can't. They sell their assets on the cheap to the rich megamonopoly.

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