Probably most famous globally for bringing Sir Richard Attenborough, costume dramas and Monty Python to screens around the world

Nothing against Sir Dickie, but I think most people would agree that his brother David is a bit more famous within a BBC context

But Richard spared no expense.

You can tell ElReg is now run by merkins. No mention of Dr Who.

I know several Americans who are devotees of Doctor Who.

that's not many out of 240 milion...

When the UK started the switch to digital TV, in November 1998, the BBC FAILED to recognise the fact that they could then have implemented a subscriber based service (instead of a paper TV licence) for the required external Digital TV receivers, using a "conditional access module".

And then with the growth of the internet and the higher download speeds available with "fibre to the street", they have FAILED yet again to take on the likes of Netflix/Amazon Prime etc by offering an online "subscription based" streaming service for all their TV channels, as they continue to "push" their outdated "iPlayer" and "Sounds" apps...

I know the BBC are highly fearful of their income from TV licence money reducing significantly (as more consumers use other sources of entertainment and do not renew their TV licences) and they still employ 3rd parties (at vast expense) to visit consumers homes in order to "police" and take to court any "TV licence evaders" - and yet this could so easily have been avoided years ago with a basic subscription service.

And they still pay Sky to broadcast their TV channels for FREE when they could easily make a standard charge of say £5-10 per month.

No CAM in specification was deliberate.

Are BBC paying Sky? They are already on Astra 2.

I do use Freesat to watch BBC HD, not touching a Murdoch box.

Sky was taken over by Comcast in 2018, it isn't Murdoch any more.

Still too expensive though.

not much has changed...

As hard as it may be to believe, Comcast are even worse.

they still employ 3rd parties (at vast expense) to visit consumers homes in order to "police" and take to court any "TV licence evaders"

Really? As I've mentioned before, database fuckups meant I'd get endlessly castigated for not having a licence while also having an automatically renewed licence for over a decade and not once did anybody actually turn up on my doorstep and ask to see my licence.

They don't. They pay Sky to list BBC channels in the Sky EPG.

If you want to meet people who are grammar fiends and pedantic to the point of driving you mad, meet the EPG team at Sky.

Sky ought to be paying the BBC to broadcast the terrestrial channels, i have quite a few clients who use freesatjust because normal TV aerials dont work. iplayer would be so much better if it had all UK channels, had past content like britbox. so many people cant be bothered with having a seprate account login for each of BBC, itv, channel 4, 5 etc. and the pairing processes can be a nightmare. if UKTV channels as a whole, were on a platform that could eb added to youtubeTV, amazon prime etc, so people can add to watchlists their content, would make it much more user friendly, which I believe they do in US.

"the BBC FAILED to recognise the fact that they could then have implemented a subscriber based service (instead of a paper TV licence) for the required external Digital TV receivers, using a "conditional access module"."

I suspect they prefer a scenario where everyone who watches anything live is forced to pay. That way, they're not beholden to the whims of the subscribing public.

I worked for a commercial broadcaster who didn't like the license fee. However they also didn't want the BBC taking advertising or sponsorship. Neither did the idea of encryption/subscription go down any better. People apparently might find the idea of two monthly charges unwelcoming and ditch the commercial one.

One of my current colleagues had complained recently about the license fee. With the cost of living going up he was worried that the family was paying for both Netflix and now Disney too. As an experiment they made a note of what the family watched over a typical week. After looking at everything he decided that they could do without either Netflix or Disney as those weren’t used as much as freeview. Can’t live without Eastenders, Strictly, Masterchef, Top Gear etc.

Thank you for that interesting perspective.

The fear of losing the TV tax is down to having to compete with other providers who have to be entertaining to survive. Hell other providers had to be entertaining enough to earn money and convince people to pay the telly tax.

If the other providers are supposed to be entertaining, how come I find more entertainment on BBC?

@MJI

"If the other providers are supposed to be entertaining, how come I find more entertainment on BBC?"

Good for you (no sarc). Thats not a bad thing. But the problem is you are the exception not the rule. That isnt to say the BBC doesnt do 'anything' entertaining or good, just not enough to be self sustaining. If it was they would have no fear of losing the TV license money. They would be fine with competition and the other providers would struggle against a competitor instead of fight a monopolistic opponent.

And before anyone jumps on the monopolistic comment, the BBC receives money from the TV license as an advantage over other providers who must be entertaining enough to pay for themselves. And yet with such an unreasonable advantage is losing out to other providers.

'How come I find more entertainment on BBC?'

A list of examples would be helpful. New content, not repeats.

'Strictly come Dancing', I get why the BBC make it, its wide appeal but really it shouldn't be made by BBC, it should be on a commercial channel, it just appeals to the lowest common denominator,

The BBC have missed their chance.

Netflix's "Wednesday" (a reboot of the Addam's Family) is an example of the content the BBC should be making, but isn't, along with 'Stranger things', those two series have cornered the under 25 market. The BBC seems stuck in the recent past, attempting to make 'me too' factual content using influencers from ex 'Made in Chelsea' stars. Cheap TV, but crucially with no longevity, no inherent value.

'Wednesday' will be shown on Netflix to new audiences and new generations for years to come, Netflix understand their market and the investment that is needed in content. They're in it for the long game, as the BBC used to be, before those working for the Beeb, just began exploiting it for their own gain by making cheap, crap TV, to fill the schedules, ignoring the long term consequences of doing that. Allowing a top-heavy management structure to develop.

Strictly is to be honest is a BBC type programme.

Imagine it on ITV with shouty presenters, or a choice of loud boomy music, or wasp in a tin can.

ITV have a rather naff skating show.

No definately a BBC one.

However I do like The Wheel.

I feel the licence is worth it just for the NHU output, and news coverage,

The problem with relying on an advertisement funded TV service is that it's all about the numbers, because viewer figures drive how much they can charge for the ad. slots.

This means that they screen large amounts of what will generate the most viewers, so we end up with seemingly endless voyeuristic social competition shows like Love Island, I'm a Celebrety, Big Brother and many, many more in the same vein, with much of the rest of the time being filled by cheap-to-make game shows and soaps. (although the BBC does these last two as well).

I don't remember the last time I saw a really informative, new documentary program on terrestrial UK commercial television. Programmes like World in Action, or the World at War just don't exist on the commercial stations. Well, maybe Channel 4 is an exception, as they do some interesting things.

What the BBC can (and according to it's charter commitments, must) still do is to produce far more niche and educational content. I find it extremely interesting that so much of the content of the documentary satellite and cable channels end up carrying repeats of BBC generated programmes.

If the BBC was forced to chase ratings, then there is just so much that we would lose as they chased the mindless, majority audience.

For me, one of the main attractions of BBC (mostly consumed via iPlayer) is the lack of advertising - I can just dive in and watch a show uninterrupted.

Back in the days of just 4 or 5 channels I could understand that adverts appeared on ITV/C4/C5 because they were commercial free-to-air, but when I tried a subscription service (Sky via satellite) I was amazed at how many of the extra channels that I was paying a subscription for also carried advertising.

Other than BBC, my wife and I try to avoid watching any broadcast channel live - for many, advert breaks form almost a third of the broadcast (and most repeated several times within an hour). Record so the ads can be skipped through.

SCD has had several mentions - it's not as yet as hyped and moronic as ITV's offerings, but they're working at it. The proportion of actual dance content seems to be reducing year on year (at least that's the impression I get, though it may be my memory blanking out the "filler-content" from previous years).

The problem chasing viewer numbers is that it stifles creativity - you end up with variations on what is already available (and yet more "reality" shows that do not meet the requirements of the BBC charter - to educate and entertain).

Entertaining at the expense of [1]educating and informing ?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Reith,_1st_Baron_Reith#British_Broadcasting_Corporation

Entertaining at the expense of educating and informing?

Being educated and informed is out of fashion these days, it interferes with arguing on social media.

@Alan J. Wylie

"Entertaining at the expense of educating and informing?"

There is a fantastic invention called the internet. Which follows from the ideal of books. Which follows from the ideal of teaching. Which comes from the ideal of parenting.

But if your kids enjoy education from TV there are kids channels and discovery/history etc channels. There are plenty options still, depends what you let them watch

I've been doing Internet stuff since (checks daybooks) May 1988: BSD 4.2/4.3

I don't watch television at all. For me, the Internet suffices. I do get some of my news from the BBC web site though.

I don't have kids.

P.S. Over the years I've worked for Pye TVT, Pace and Echostar

Using the wide variety of media platforms unfortunately often does the opposite of education. True, the content is there is you want to look for it. Bu so does the ability to restrict what you watch to just what you feel you want to watch.

Linear TV used to serve a purpose because it encouraged people to watch things that they did not necessarily choose, and could end up broadening their outlook on the world. And the restricted nature of pre-cable/satellite TV often meant that people actually turned it off and went and did something else.

Nowadays, if all you are interested in is football, or Friends, or game shows, or Kids programmes, you can endlessly channel hop or just stream only those things you want, and never see anything else, or have a motivation to get up from the couch.

This is, in my mind, what Alan was pointing out, that the BBC generates diversity.

You quote the documentary channels. Just look at the programmes they carry, and see how many of them the BBC had a hand in producing. Where will we be in 20 years time if the BBC were to stop generating that type of programme. Still broadcasting the content we're watching now?

Yes, the same with printed newspapers. It was very easy to read the first few paragraphs before deciding if it was interesting to you - I'd then often read the whole piece. The web doesnt have that appeal. There's so much garbage that we learn to make instant judgements and reject stuff that doesn't appeal before gving it a try.

It's when you see or read stuff that you had no idea you might find interesting that you learn new things.

Sadly BBC documentaries have been pretty weak for years along with a reliance on the presenter. Not Mr Attenborough I might add, but Brian Cox says the same stuff, too slowly, over and over again.

I'd rather see more from Jim Al Khalili or Nick Lane - a whole grown up series on evolution could be quite something.

But the funding, the funding - and the role government plays to grind them into the ground.

This is, in my mind, what Alan was pointing out, that the BBC generates diversity.

Yes, however more to the point, it's the BBC's mission statement in its charter, courtesy of Lord Reith (via the link I posted earlier)

[1]The BBC charter .

5. The BBC’s Mission

The Mission of the BBC is to act in the public interest, serving all audiences through the provision of impartial, high-quality and distinctive output and services which inform, educate and entertain.

[1] https://downloads.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/about/how_we_govern/2016/charter.pdf

But why? Please explain the actual benefit of eliminating diversity. The more we 'converge' our communications the higher the chance that a single failure will take the whole lot down, whether by accident or attack. We seem hell bent on making ourselves more and more vulnerable as we increasingly depend on global comms to keep our societies operational and safe. Seems to me, that's not an ideal policy, and we'll find this out the hard way one day.

Completely agree with you. It seems to be, follow a certain path for the sake of it.

Many people do not have access to the internet at the speeds required. If you look at the freeview channels you can watch without any problems. Online you have to have accounts for every one of the separate channel broadcasters. In addition, many channels do not have an online presence.

The report actually states that 73% use terrestrial broadcasting reception, so that is hardly a reason to go purely online when 16% are IPlayer based viewing.

The other aspect is that as far as i can see from non UK people online, they think the BBC is brilliant for its content. The BBC provides so much diverse content which subscription services do not have to - news, political programmes, general programming etc.

Original DTTV access.

BBC did tend to run loose with the specifications and exploiting the not realised loop holes. such as changing channels on each service forcing some receivers to continually retune until updated.

Press 1 for BBC1 get BBC Choice.

Picture though was superb then, like a DVD.

Pay was a bit pants though, CAM was required (on a shelf somewhere), I gave up on that about a week before the bankrupcy.

Freeview

Quite correctly the future of DTTV was handed to the major broadcasters. And a new specification was written up.

BBC pushed for no compulsary CAM (with ITV C4 C5 agreement) to protect their FTA access, and to prevent a paywall.

The first Freeview DTTV devices often had card slots but no hardware to support them.

DSO provided the first problem with moving from 2K to 8K, this knocked out quite a few tuners, some due to hardware limitations (first gen Sony IDTVs, Nokia dodgy boxes among many others), some due to lack of software support from the manufacturers (eg Pace).

I now use Freeview and Freesat, I have too much good TV to watch.

One PVR recommendation, make sure the word HUMAX is written on it.

You've just reminded me of my OnDigital experiences in 2000. I has just moved to within eyesight of the Sandy transmitter, and my new shiny digital TV box wouldn't work. Back in those days when service was still a thing, they even sent a man round to investigate. He concluded that I needed an attenuator in the input lead as the signal was far too loud, despite being fed from the a tiny aerial in the loft.

After that, it worked reasonably well for the short duration the service existed, and then went on to be my first set-top box on the early days of Freeview. Since then those duties have been taken over by a Humax box which is still going strong (albeit with customised firmware).

Beer, as it's Friday.

My Ondigital subscription was £3 per month.

IDTV one

I'm as guilty as the next person but broadcast TV - digital or analogue - is an order of magnitude more environmentally friendly than all of us streaming from servers at our own whim.

Fuck the planet so I can watch Game Of Thrones is not a great solution.

Except that the world has moved on and has become accustomed to on demand streaming and there's little chance of things going back to the way they were. What the BBC does won't affect what the RotW does and going back to a solely broadcast model will just isolate the BBC from the world markets that make it viable.

The "world" has not moved on.

Only a few have become "accustomed" to streaming. Many of them are moving away from too much of that because of the problem with binge watching and of course the expense of paying £9.99 for every single channel a month.

I once sat on netflix for months, watching NOTHING BUT star trek NG. Its a brilliant show of course but its all I watched, I was totally unaware of anything else, even the news. I binge easily so I need live TV to stop me doing it. Maybe there should be a setting to turn on anti-binge mode so you cant watch more than 2 or 3 episodes of the same series in as many days. I'm too lazy to change settings so this will be a good deterrent, for a while maybe.

I dont see this world has moved on line. Freeview/freesat and other live TV stations still provide vast amounts more to view than I find buried on netflix or amazon prime. Just today I was reminded of an anime I wanted to finish as I started watching it long ago. No, I'm not signing up to crunchroll, I'm not dedicated enough for that but surely amazon or netflix will have it? Netflix dont, and Amazon have a placeholder to say they once did have it but I was too late and its gone now.

I can however get it on DVD...

World has moved on? No, more like people have narrowed their choice due to convenience and that damn binging factor.

The BBC gets most of its money with the backing of the police, an advantage many businesses would love to have. Do they take that money and do their job of being a public service broadcaster? Only partly. For example: A true public service broadcaster would tell me how to watch the footie no matter what channel its on... the BBC does not do that, they only talk about BBC channels/radio/app/website. The BBC's attitude is to compete, and they have the field tilted in their favour.

Then they spend money on silly things... Search? Changing the logo of their apps every 6 months instead of making them work well? Pushing DAB on us even though it hardly works?

That's ignoring that the licence fee has to be the least efficient way of collecting a tax imaginable.

To further your conclusion, I learned not long ago that France is [1]dropping the TV tax that was in effect since forever.

For the French government to actually remove a tax is almost as groundbreaking as finding life on another planet.

[1] https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/actualites/A15693

No, the French have also removed Road Tax 10 years ago, much to the annoyance of cyclists.

Don't blame the BBC for DAB radio in the UK (although they did have a big hand in the original specification).

The blame properly lies with the UK Government, who have been chasing a digital only media strategy for several decades. They see the free'd up spectrum as a resource that they can license and sell.

In order to compress more radio into a smaller spectrum, they've saddled us with a poor system by rushing through a too early standard, with too many channels carrying the same basic type of content, at the expense of quality and coverage (how may of the commercial DAB music stations broadcast low-bit rate mono?).

The government appears to have now decided that broadcast media using the EM spectrum now needs to go completely, after failing in their previous digital strategy, just to get the job done. And they're giving the regulators an agenda (again) to try to make it happen.

Just be glad that people pushed back on FM radio. IIRC, it was supposed to disappear by 2010 according to their original schedule. If they want to eliminate the use of radio-frequency broadcasting, they need to make basic digital services a regulated essential service, available at a cost affordable to everyone (which may mean free to certain segments of the population), not leaving it to a market that will by definition exclude those who lack the ability to pay!

> Just be glad that people pushed back on FM radio

My car radio certainly is! I usually listen to a couple of stations on DAB but no DAB in the car ad the stations streaming options barley works when driving about the area.

Local BBC radio it is on my 20 min drive to work. And its great.

> they need to make basic digital services a regulated essential service, available at a cost affordable to everyone (which may mean free to certain segments of the population)

I may end up joining them, I think most believe OAP's just will dissapear leaving tech savvy internet surfacing streaming 80 year olds. Thing is, you never know how many faculties you will retain as you get older, you may end up only being able to, well, turn on the TV and press the channel button. Not every 30 something today will be able to stream when they are 86... they never think about that.

maintain a traditional broadcasting network because of the greater resilience it provides over digital and the universal coverage it enables

Demonstrated by the outcry when the [1]Bilsdale transmitting mast caught fire.

[2]Questions in Parliament

[1] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/news-centre/2022/ofcom-publishes-incident-review-following-bilsdale-transmitter-fire

[2] https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1970/jul/24/belmont-transmitter-and-yorkshire

YouTube went berzerk and flooded their player software with commercials, so I’d been forced to upgrade to “NewPipe” freeware that defeats the commercials by exploiting the download function to act as an alternate streamer. Of course I had borrowed Netflix credentials from various partners on my trusty old PS3 for years but I never once bothered to try it out; I don’t think they have anything worth watching? BBC archive puts out tons of interesting archival footage all the time. I think Netflix has the Game of Thrones series but it never sounded interesting to me. Of course I loved the 1978 Rotoscope cartoon movie of Lord of the Rings, too bad they never completed the project. Forced me to read all the books! And yes, absolutely exposed the glaring plot hole about the Great Eagles flying indiscriminately into Mordor. I was greatly disappointed in the CGI remake, of course. Couldn’t even get through the first movie. Well, they make out the Elves as having superhuman Kung-fu powers, don’t they. If you want to make a 1970s Kung-fu movie that’s magnificent, I’m all for it: but not in LOTR please! Two completely different things, my opinion.

Sure, the BBC is renowned on the world stage for quality programming and its World News Service (unavailable in the UK), but it is not a worldwide service provider.

The BBC isn't in the same league as Netflix.

As was stated in this article, the BBC's income is about £5bn while Netflix gets some $30bn.

The audience and reach is also different: 20 million uk households vs 200+ million paying netflix users across all continents.

One produces most of its content and has expensive production facilities for that, while the other mostly commissions or just licenses content, ironically a lot of it from the BBC.

I don't get this whole "world beating" mantra and competing with the daddy/ Kleenex of streaming.

The empire is dead. Being the best in the UK will suffice