The reason for these regulations is that the BBC can produce and offer things free at the point of use (broadly) because of an essentially forced payment. This can have problems because it puts a greater barrier in the way for competitors.
I'm not sure they got it right here but there is a valid reason for this kind of regulation.
> The British TV industry wouldn’t see an on-demand service for nearly another decade.
I'm sorry, what? There was an on demand service before this, as talked about in the article. And it absolutely didn't take until near 2019 to see others appearing.
> Netflix would’ve never stood a chance of getting its current market penetration [in the UK],” says the BBC source. “All the big players would have had the market covered for streaming video-on-demand (SVOD)
The wider context here is that ministers have been arguing that the BBC is behind the times, because Netflix-style on-demand services are the way people want to consume content now. Not only that, but an annual subscription to Netflix is cheaper than the BBC licence fee.
The BBC have responded by pointing out that government regulators killed off their attempt to work with competitors to produce such a service over a decade ago (Project Kangaroo), and now they’re being criticised by government for not being one.
I used to work at the ABC (the aussie version of BBC). We have a pretty good streaming service called iview. It started ahead of the curve, 2 years before Netflix started its streaming service.
While I wasn't there at the time, stories have been that iView faced government queries at the time for "wasting money" (and after sometime, the govt relented and funded it in 2013). This back and forth went on and on until today.
Now, of course, the stories in the media is whether or not we should impose a quota on Australian content on external streaming services. All I can do is give that Annoyed Picard reaction.
The BBC have responded by pointing out that government regulators killed off their attempt to work with competitors to produce such a service over a decade ago (Project Kangaroo), and now they’re being criticised by government for not being one.
I don't think they're being criticised by government for not being a Netflix-style VOD service. The debate is as to whether they should be funded by the licence fee with all the restrictions that come with it to allow competition in the market vs. letting them do their own thing without the licence fee. The government do appear to be coming down on the side against the licence fee, but that could just be a negotiating position, at least for the foreseeable.
No one as far as I can see is making the argument that a licence fee funded broadcaster should have taken that money and used it to launch a Netflix competitor.
Which is a crazy argument because iPlayer was ahead of the times for years before Netflix became a mainstream choice in UK households. Hell, the 2012 coverage of the London Olympics was still some of the best coverage I ever remember seeing of a sporting event.
> because Netflix-style on-demand services are the way people want to consume content now
Is it? I have been exposed a bit to Netflix and the content is a lot of filler with the occasional interesting movie. But not nearly enough value for what it costs in my opinion, and with the very limited programming it would become boring quickly.
Does that mean you're repeating The Guardian's talking points?
Or is it possible that a person might hold views that overlap with those perceived also to be put forward by media organisations?
The BBC's success risks suffocating commercial media. Put too many restrictions on the BBC and the risk is of suffocating the BBC. It seems reasonable to me that the government should attempt to find a balance. And, being a government staffed by humans, they make the wrong call sometimes.
> The reason for these regulations is that the BBC can produce and offer things free at the point of use
But this wouldn't have been "free":
As the director of technology and new media at the BBC, Highfield had just overseen the launch of the iPlayer – BBC's online catch-up service. Now he wanted to try and build a commercial equivalent that would earn more.
You'd have paid for the service on top of, the now included with license fee, broadcast/iPlayer.
Now sure the BBC may have had some advantage over nascent offerings at the time (2007), but let's face these realistically didn't exist in the UK. What we have now is the market controlled by two US companies (and Sky to an extent) that exploit tax loopholes and don't treat their employee's terribly well (certainly in the case of Amazon).
Yes, but the regulations are best explained using free as the example because for a significant amount of the work they are not legally allowed to charge or (e.g.) show adverts. The practical reality is that you can replace "free" with "below cost". Unless this was funded entirely from worldwide, it would be using a source of funding not available to others.
> Now sure the BBC may have had some advantage over nascent offerings at the time (2007), but let's face these realistically didn't exist in the UK
Yes, which is again kind of the point - there was a space for offerings to come in and compete against each other. The ruling was that Kangaroo would likely stop this competition, including stopping competition between the BBC/ITV/C4. There was still a fight to get YouView past the competition stage (canvas back when I worked on the apps, AS2 & constrained video memory was... interesting).
You must have a license to watch broadcast TV or use the BBC iPlayer (the online BBC-only streaming service). If you only use your TV(s) with a games console, to watch recorded content or streaming content over the Internet, you don't need to pay it. You are not required to provide access to an inspector from TV Licensing to confirm that your TV isn't hooked up to an aerial or satellite box, but it makes life easier if you do.
The license fee costs £154.50 a year, or £52 if you only have a black and white TV (lord knows how given we're now 100% digital), but the government pays it for you if you're over 75 years of age.
This produces an income of ~£3.5 billion a year, and broadly breaks down into 55% spent on TV broadcasting, 17% radio broadcasting, 10% for the BBC World Service and the rest of it goes on the website, various apps, collecting the fee itself and the transmitter network across the country used by all terrestrial broadcasters, not just the BBC. It also pays slabs of cash into the EBU who produce the Eurovision Song Contest, amongst other things...
This results in nine national TV channels, 10 UK-wide radio stations, six national (i.e. England, Wales, Scotland, NI only), and 40 local radio stations. The BBC website, iPlayer, apps in the App Stores, etc. are all paid for through this as well. If you're outside the UK you will see adverts as it can't subsidise access for non-UK citizens, but inside the UK all this content is 100% free of all advertising other than to cross-promote BBC content.
In recent months the Government have suggested that it's an unfair burden. There are two sides to this truth:
1. Most magistrate courts seem to spend a significant amount of their time dealing with non-payers, and there are people in prison for non-payment. IIRC, it's the most common crime committed by incarcerated women in the UK. For context, it's worth noting that the incarceration rate in the UK is about 1/5th of the USA's so the actual number is still quite low, but still...
2. Most people think scrapping it is a political move, because there are weird power dynamics between Downing Street, the execs in charge of BBC News and the rest of the BBC who seem to have problems with the News division and their friendliness with Downing Street and the PM in particular.
As a result, I think most people would prefer that the license was cheaper, the penalty for non-payment could not include prison and that we keep it.
I have a TV without a TV licence, but here is how not joined up the TV licence IT department is.
I sent away to get a refund for my TV licence as I only had it part of the year, I filled in the form as to why I no longer require a TV licence. The TV Licence people agreed and sent me my refund.
Next week I start getting the threatning letters that I have no TV licence... I've been getting these threatning letters ever since at the start of every month. Idiots.
Because that would undermine the entire point of the BBC:
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
British Telecom was trialing on-demand video deployments in the 80s.
No internet, instead it used fibre optic cable to create a switched video network, which could be used to watch normal cable tv channels, or connect the user to a dedicated remote laserdisc player.
While such systems never got wide-spread deployments, it's interesting to consider how the media landscape would have changed if we had gone that route.
BBC research are amazing. They've been doing this for decades, most recently with next gen codecs and latency issues on internet transmission. As a British person I'm actually proud of them, even though many people complain their politics are orthogonal to mine.
Maybe. Nobody uses the BBC codecs because they aren't really next gen. They're alright, but the industry has agreed on many-vendor international consortiums to develop codecs, and their outputs are always the best codecs available. Those are the ones that get turned into hardware acceleration chips which you need these days to be adopted and competitive.
It's not really clear why the BBC spends money on duplicating this research instead of contributing its ideas to HEVC, AVC etc like everyone else does. Easy to argue that's a waste of tax money. (I'm also British).
This is a very fascinating discussion. NRK, the Norwegian national broadcaster also does this. NRK Beta, which experiments with new technology in broadcasting, launched a streaming service in 2007, which was the basis for the streaming offering they are still providing today.
It's worth mentioning that NRK and Norway has taken inspiration from BBC since the dawn of television, including the licensing system (which has just been replaced by a fixed tax).
We have a few institutions that are close to being considered legendary across the planet: NHS and BBC spring to mind. Neither of those two are perfect but they are both ground breaking and a bit subversive.
I doubt anyone not from these shores (UK) would ever peg the UKoGB as a hot bed of left wing leaning types. Our stereotype abroad is pretty fixed and pretty obvious () and also encouraged by us: tourism is a bloody good earner.
We (people in the UK) now find ourselves as rabid defenders of a left wing dream, despite our political leanings. You know why as well as I do, that we love our NHS. If I want to, I can wander into a hospital ER and will be seen to, without any discussion of money. When someone needs medical assistance, metal discs or bits of paper should not be involved - they are merely pretty things and not useful.
(
) I should point out here that the "British Scientists" meme in Russia (int al) is one we are aware of, and also laugh at and with. There are loads more: and we still laugh with you, because we love you.
On similar lines, I heard that DSL development was largely funded by the telcos because they wanted to get some of that sweet cableTV subscription money; with broadband internet being largely an afterthought...
In the early 90s, it's how it would of had to work.
By the late 90s, it would be cheaper and much lower maintenance to replace the robot laserdisc library and banks of players with a large array of HDDs and a hardware MPEG 1/2 decoder chip per viewer.
Yeah if you didn't mind waiting 30 minutes to an hour to start watching.
Sky Box Office just used spare bandwidth to continuously broadcast the same film on different channels with a time offset. That's why then only had a selection of about 3-5 films at any one time.
That was still a useful service but not the same as real video on demand.
Historically, one of the benefits of a licensepayer-funded national broadcaster in the BBC was that it served as a nexus for investment in media distribution infrastructure and standards. The BBC played a leading role in the definition of TV transmission standards, including advances like color, teletext, closed captioning, digital audio, and digital video; In the digital era they have helped to develop video compression and codec technology, in particular trying to ensure that there are unencumbered royalty-free options for video processing.
In the light of that it would seem natural for the BBC to be involved in developing a standard, equal access streaming platform for content distribution in the internet era - in exactly the same way as their transmission investments helped to bootstrap independent broadcasting, BBC investment in streaming would have smoothed the road for independent content producers to follow.
The particular tragedy is that, for its time, iPlayer was a phenomenally well engineered product - the BBC had done the work to deliver a scalable, user friendly streaming platform, before anybody else had really done so. Taking that platform that had been built with licensepayer money and using it to create a platform that let commercial players deliver content to UK consumers would have created a very different media market and set an alternative shape for how streaming services might work - and yes, it might have obviated the need for Netflix in the UK, but it would have opened up the UK media market to the likes of HBO, Disney, the NFL, and so on in ways that would have profoundly changed the media landscape.
Internally, the BBC have a private streaming platform, [that used to be] called 'Redux' where 90%+ of their entire back catalogue is available for staff and journos to watch and search, as it's all fully indexed with thumbnails, and complete scripts. The UI is something out of the 90s but it works and is used all the time.
Redux is very good at it's job, but it's very much not built as a public streaming platform and doesn't do a lot of real world things you'd need such a platform to do.
This article is weird: the tone it sets is that them being blocked was a bad thing but then they say:
> Netflix would’ve never stood a chance of getting its current market penetration [in the UK],” says the BBC source. “All the big players would have had the market covered for streaming video-on-demand (SVOD)
That's exactly why they blocked it: to allow for multiple individual competitors to enter the market. So... the regulators did a good job after all: by blocking the huge merging of content from three of the biggest providers in the UK.
Don't confuse the article having an ideology for it being wrong. State-operated streaming services have had success in other countries without monopolistic problems.
Take, for example, Denmark where, in addition to hosting a streaming service, multiple state TV-channels have gone online-only. On top of this, public libraries themselves have their own free streaming services.
> Digital was considered the “weird sibling” of television and radio before the internet content boom, and commissioners in traditional broadcast were worried digital services would cannibalise their audiences.
I spent some time working for a similar organization. And even in 2020, the same attitudes prevails. I've literally seen radio personalities and producers admit the audience is declining, but ask why we can't just milk the boomer audience until they all die off in 30 years time.
These organisations are filled with people who only understand one way to do things, and are incredibly hostile to change. The people on the ground resist any big strategic shifts from management, and use their union powers to fight back.
The article seems to imply that if BBC launched its own video streaming service when Netflix was still sending DVDs, it would've become the next Netflix.
I have to disagree. The execution is what really matters, not the idea.
- Could BBC have hired the talent to build and scale a credible competitor?
- Could BBC have popularized the model of on-demand, subscription based TV?
- Could BBC have acquired and created content people want to watch?
If the answer to these questions is yes (and the regulations in question aren't a problem), I would highly encourage BBC to launch a video streaming service today!
The first two, yes. The BBC have a long history of being a place UK techies want to work at, and they're already subscription-based, more or less. But they never in a million years could have created the breadth of content Netflix created, even if they were rolling in money. They would have made BBC stuff but with higher production values.
The challenge isn't building a website that can stream video. The challenge is streaming 15% (I think it used to be even higher) of total internet traffic, which is what Netflix does. iPlayer shows the ability to do the former, not the latter.
This isn't to say that BBC couldn't have pulled it off, just that iPlayer isn't evidence that they would have.
At one point, BBC iPlayer was building a MSN plugin so that you could talk to your friends whilst you watched TV programs, this is 10 years ago though.
Readit News
I'm not sure they got it right here but there is a valid reason for this kind of regulation.
> The British TV industry wouldn’t see an on-demand service for nearly another decade.
I'm sorry, what? There was an on demand service before this, as talked about in the article. And it absolutely didn't take until near 2019 to see others appearing.
> Netflix would’ve never stood a chance of getting its current market penetration [in the UK],” says the BBC source. “All the big players would have had the market covered for streaming video-on-demand (SVOD)
That's kind of the point though, isn't it?
The BBC have responded by pointing out that government regulators killed off their attempt to work with competitors to produce such a service over a decade ago (Project Kangaroo), and now they’re being criticised by government for not being one.
While I wasn't there at the time, stories have been that iView faced government queries at the time for "wasting money" (and after sometime, the govt relented and funded it in 2013). This back and forth went on and on until today.
Now, of course, the stories in the media is whether or not we should impose a quota on Australian content on external streaming services. All I can do is give that Annoyed Picard reaction.
I don't think they're being criticised by government for not being a Netflix-style VOD service. The debate is as to whether they should be funded by the licence fee with all the restrictions that come with it to allow competition in the market vs. letting them do their own thing without the licence fee. The government do appear to be coming down on the side against the licence fee, but that could just be a negotiating position, at least for the foreseeable.
No one as far as I can see is making the argument that a licence fee funded broadcaster should have taken that money and used it to launch a Netflix competitor.
Is it? I have been exposed a bit to Netflix and the content is a lot of filler with the occasional interesting movie. But not nearly enough value for what it costs in my opinion, and with the very limited programming it would become boring quickly.
Or is it possible that a person might hold views that overlap with those perceived also to be put forward by media organisations?
The BBC's success risks suffocating commercial media. Put too many restrictions on the BBC and the risk is of suffocating the BBC. It seems reasonable to me that the government should attempt to find a balance. And, being a government staffed by humans, they make the wrong call sometimes.
But this wouldn't have been "free":
As the director of technology and new media at the BBC, Highfield had just overseen the launch of the iPlayer – BBC's online catch-up service. Now he wanted to try and build a commercial equivalent that would earn more.
You'd have paid for the service on top of, the now included with license fee, broadcast/iPlayer.
Now sure the BBC may have had some advantage over nascent offerings at the time (2007), but let's face these realistically didn't exist in the UK. What we have now is the market controlled by two US companies (and Sky to an extent) that exploit tax loopholes and don't treat their employee's terribly well (certainly in the case of Amazon).
> Now sure the BBC may have had some advantage over nascent offerings at the time (2007), but let's face these realistically didn't exist in the UK
Yes, which is again kind of the point - there was a space for offerings to come in and compete against each other. The ruling was that Kangaroo would likely stop this competition, including stopping competition between the BBC/ITV/C4. There was still a fight to get YouView past the competition stage (canvas back when I worked on the apps, AS2 & constrained video memory was... interesting).
You must have a license to watch broadcast TV or use the BBC iPlayer (the online BBC-only streaming service). If you only use your TV(s) with a games console, to watch recorded content or streaming content over the Internet, you don't need to pay it. You are not required to provide access to an inspector from TV Licensing to confirm that your TV isn't hooked up to an aerial or satellite box, but it makes life easier if you do.
The license fee costs £154.50 a year, or £52 if you only have a black and white TV (lord knows how given we're now 100% digital), but the government pays it for you if you're over 75 years of age.
This produces an income of ~£3.5 billion a year, and broadly breaks down into 55% spent on TV broadcasting, 17% radio broadcasting, 10% for the BBC World Service and the rest of it goes on the website, various apps, collecting the fee itself and the transmitter network across the country used by all terrestrial broadcasters, not just the BBC. It also pays slabs of cash into the EBU who produce the Eurovision Song Contest, amongst other things...
This results in nine national TV channels, 10 UK-wide radio stations, six national (i.e. England, Wales, Scotland, NI only), and 40 local radio stations. The BBC website, iPlayer, apps in the App Stores, etc. are all paid for through this as well. If you're outside the UK you will see adverts as it can't subsidise access for non-UK citizens, but inside the UK all this content is 100% free of all advertising other than to cross-promote BBC content.
In recent months the Government have suggested that it's an unfair burden. There are two sides to this truth:
1. Most magistrate courts seem to spend a significant amount of their time dealing with non-payers, and there are people in prison for non-payment. IIRC, it's the most common crime committed by incarcerated women in the UK. For context, it's worth noting that the incarceration rate in the UK is about 1/5th of the USA's so the actual number is still quite low, but still...
2. Most people think scrapping it is a political move, because there are weird power dynamics between Downing Street, the execs in charge of BBC News and the rest of the BBC who seem to have problems with the News division and their friendliness with Downing Street and the PM in particular.
As a result, I think most people would prefer that the license was cheaper, the penalty for non-payment could not include prison and that we keep it.
I sent away to get a refund for my TV licence as I only had it part of the year, I filled in the form as to why I no longer require a TV licence. The TV Licence people agreed and sent me my refund.
Next week I start getting the threatning letters that I have no TV licence... I've been getting these threatning letters ever since at the start of every month. Idiots.
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
https://www.bbc.com/aboutthebbc/governance/mission
It's not a commercial broadcaster.
No internet, instead it used fibre optic cable to create a switched video network, which could be used to watch normal cable tv channels, or connect the user to a dedicated remote laserdisc player.
While such systems never got wide-spread deployments, it's interesting to consider how the media landscape would have changed if we had gone that route.
Source, A promotional/technical video from the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1AiM1S8MGk
The Conservative government of the time decided that they wanted to open up the cable tv market.
They didn’t want the incumbent BT dominating the market so they banned them from carrying TV services.
No TV, no products requiring fibre to the home.
BT quietly dismantled all of the infrastructure they’d put together to manufacture fibre products. Like Europe’s largest cleanroom for instance.
The market ended up split between two foreign companies, Telewest and NTL, using coax.
It's not really clear why the BBC spends money on duplicating this research instead of contributing its ideas to HEVC, AVC etc like everyone else does. Easy to argue that's a waste of tax money. (I'm also British).
It's worth mentioning that NRK and Norway has taken inspiration from BBC since the dawn of television, including the licensing system (which has just been replaced by a fixed tax).
I doubt anyone not from these shores (UK) would ever peg the UKoGB as a hot bed of left wing leaning types. Our stereotype abroad is pretty fixed and pretty obvious () and also encouraged by us: tourism is a bloody good earner.
We (people in the UK) now find ourselves as rabid defenders of a left wing dream, despite our political leanings. You know why as well as I do, that we love our NHS. If I want to, I can wander into a hospital ER and will be seen to, without any discussion of money. When someone needs medical assistance, metal discs or bits of paper should not be involved - they are merely pretty things and not useful.
(
) I should point out here that the "British Scientists" meme in Russia (int al) is one we are aware of, and also laugh at and with. There are loads more: and we still laugh with you, because we love you.The tone of the article was "F^$k me it works"
By the late 90s, it would be cheaper and much lower maintenance to replace the robot laserdisc library and banks of players with a large array of HDDs and a hardware MPEG 1/2 decoder chip per viewer.
Sky Box Office just used spare bandwidth to continuously broadcast the same film on different channels with a time offset. That's why then only had a selection of about 3-5 films at any one time.
That was still a useful service but not the same as real video on demand.
In the light of that it would seem natural for the BBC to be involved in developing a standard, equal access streaming platform for content distribution in the internet era - in exactly the same way as their transmission investments helped to bootstrap independent broadcasting, BBC investment in streaming would have smoothed the road for independent content producers to follow.
The particular tragedy is that, for its time, iPlayer was a phenomenally well engineered product - the BBC had done the work to deliver a scalable, user friendly streaming platform, before anybody else had really done so. Taking that platform that had been built with licensepayer money and using it to create a platform that let commercial players deliver content to UK consumers would have created a very different media market and set an alternative shape for how streaming services might work - and yes, it might have obviated the need for Netflix in the UK, but it would have opened up the UK media market to the likes of HBO, Disney, the NFL, and so on in ways that would have profoundly changed the media landscape.
> Netflix would’ve never stood a chance of getting its current market penetration [in the UK],” says the BBC source. “All the big players would have had the market covered for streaming video-on-demand (SVOD)
That's exactly why they blocked it: to allow for multiple individual competitors to enter the market. So... the regulators did a good job after all: by blocking the huge merging of content from three of the biggest providers in the UK.
Take, for example, Denmark where, in addition to hosting a streaming service, multiple state TV-channels have gone online-only. On top of this, public libraries themselves have their own free streaming services.
I spent some time working for a similar organization. And even in 2020, the same attitudes prevails. I've literally seen radio personalities and producers admit the audience is declining, but ask why we can't just milk the boomer audience until they all die off in 30 years time.
These organisations are filled with people who only understand one way to do things, and are incredibly hostile to change. The people on the ground resist any big strategic shifts from management, and use their union powers to fight back.
I have to disagree. The execution is what really matters, not the idea.
- Could BBC have hired the talent to build and scale a credible competitor?
- Could BBC have popularized the model of on-demand, subscription based TV?
- Could BBC have acquired and created content people want to watch?
If the answer to these questions is yes (and the regulations in question aren't a problem), I would highly encourage BBC to launch a video streaming service today!
> Could BBC have hired the talent to build and scale a credible competitor?
Yes, iPlayer pre-dates digital Netflix by a significant margin
And BBC content is sold widely worldwide.
This isn't to say that BBC couldn't have pulled it off, just that iPlayer isn't evidence that they would have.
I would presume it’s the British exceptionalism that would make a difference here?