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An audience of young people who almost certainly visit youtube regularly would then have a chance of being able to be notified when a show they actually like on the BBC releases.
hasn't the bbc always been outspent by commercial production houses? what happens when the streaming giants start focusing on pumping out low risk crap as they mature into what they're replacing? i always thought the thesis of the bbc was that you didn't need huge budgets to produce high quality programming. and that, in fact, the opposite is true: moderate budget in the hands of the capable and passionate can produc…
You can stop subscribing and stop giving them money.
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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…
That seems like an easy problem to solve, if somebody at Netflix wanted to. Make it easy for people to create their own curated playlists / streams, and then you can just turn on "Jimbob23's Stupid Funny Stuff" or "Best of Late Night Cartoons" or something.
(1) Based on what I've seen from spending many hours scrolling through their available content (or what the algorithm will show me of it, anyway!), I'm not actually sure Netflix could put that content together into a 24/7 program that resembles a linear TV channel, even given how repetitive and often shitty linear TV content is. I could definitely be wrong about this, but I think Netflix lacks both the dynamic breadth and thematic depth of content. On the "dynamic breadth": Linear TV is at least 95% repeats, but if you watch it one day and then watch it again 6 months later, the content in your latter watch will usually be totally disjoint from the first watch. Meanwhile whenever I go on Netflix I swear like 75% of what I'm shown is things they were showing me 2+ years ago. Maybe they could still assemble their content into a 24/7/365 schedule that mimics linear TV programming, but I wouldn't bet on that.
(2) A linear TV channel isn't just a bunch of shows concatenated one right after another. At a minimum it has interstitials between shows/segments telling you what's next and what's on later. These are what gives the channel its personality/brand, and I'd assume it takes at least a few full-time staff per 24/7 channel. Think Discovery Channel's "Shark Week". It was mostly a bunch of repeats of shows they already had that happened to be shark-related, but the interstitials for it marketed it into a national event. And, dare I say it...linear TV often has ads. Ads can be a nice part of TV (especially for shitty/campy TV) -- they're when you go to the bathroom, get a snack, and/or chat about what you just watched. Certainly not a required part of linear TV (HBO and BBC are good linear TV channels and don't have ads), but hard for Netflix in particular to recreate if they were aiming to replicate the full linear TV experience.
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…
I got such a kick out of my 7 year old at my grandparents. We turned on some random movie that was half way through and she said: "Oh, let's watch this, start it from the beginning." When I told her that's not how cable TV works, she looked at me like I was telling her some kind of stupid dad joke.
Ah, one of the "everyone who disagrees with me is stupid" types. Good of him to make that clear right up front so I didn't waste any more time reading.
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> 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 contract…
BBC (and other national broadcasters) should focus on news, children's TV and maybe a small selection of cultural stuff that otherwise wouldn't have exposure. It makes no sense to compete in the commercial entertainment space. I'm already noticing that there's stuff on streaming now that includes funding from several non-profit or national cultural organisations, I think that model can work well. I enjoy watching Eur…
This is what Japan's NHK does, and I watch it a lot on Roku. Documentaries, cooking shows, talk shows focusing on Japanese culture, etc. They're basically cultivating and training tourists, which is great! I want to know about famous places that I can visit, new food I can try, and enough Japanese to at least get directions or buy things from people who can't speak English. And, while the production values aren't Hol…
When Florida paid Emeril Lagasse to produce a show that's purpose was partly to promote Florida tourism, people freaked out and it ruined his career.
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> 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…
The BBC is there to “inform, educate and entertain”. It gets government(/licence fee) funding because only the last of these is likely to be profitable. The BBC is far from perfect, but its documentaries are great and it remains the most trusted source of news in the UK - give the news division a requirement to be profitable and the sensationalism that follows would destroy that trust pretty quickly. The last thing w…
It's kinda interesting that the journalist supposed to criticize the government are... on the government's payroll. There's a massive conflict of interests right there.
> The last thing we need is a news landscape even more similar to the US.
You mean several different organizations with different viewpoints and financial support from backers with known agendas?
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I got such a kick out of my 7 year old at my grandparents. We turned on some random movie that was half way through and she said: "Oh, let's watch this, start it from the beginning." When I told her that's not how cable TV works, she looked at me like I was telling her some kind of stupid dad joke.
My 6 year old thinks that the screen goes black in some shows because that's when the exciting part is about to happen. Of course, it's actually where the program would normally break for ads . On Netflix/Disney+ this doesn't happen (yet!) so he's come to the conclusion that it's just a signal of impending excitement :)
For example Scooby Doo would be falling to his death... Fade to black... Fade back in... and he's higher up (?!)... Shaggy swings in and saves him.
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The BBC is there to “inform, educate and entertain”. It gets government(/licence fee) funding because only the last of these is likely to be profitable. The BBC is far from perfect, but its documentaries are great and it remains the most trusted source of news in the UK - give the news division a requirement to be profitable and the sensationalism that follows would destroy that trust pretty quickly. The last thing w…
> and it remains the most trusted source of news in the UK - give the news division a requirement to be profitable and the sensationalism that follows would destroy that trust pretty quickly. It's kinda interesting that the journalist supposed to criticize the government are... on the government's payroll. There's a massive conflict of interests right there. > The last thing we need is a news landscape even more simi…