Slashdot Mirror

"The BBC, the UK's national broadcaster, and ITV, the biggest private player in the UK market, are in the 'concluding phase of talks' to create a rival to Netflix," writes Slashdot reader AmiMoJo. The BBC's director general Tony Hall said the aim was to launch the "BritBox" rival to Netflix in the UK the second half of 2019. Neither organisation would say how the services would be priced, but Lord Hall said it would be "competitive". There are reports it could cost £5 a month.

A similar service, also called BritBox, is already available in the US and has amassed 500,000 subscribers.
Their announcement promises "an unrivalled collection of British boxsets and original series, on demand, all in one place." Diginomica writes that "the more cynical among us" might call it "a knee-jerk reaction to Netflix," adding "the BBC has a bad case of Netflix envy."

They ask where this would leave future BBC-Netflix joint productions -- and whether BBC content would be removed from both Netflix and Amazon. But they also believe that if there is a threat to Netflix, it's the upcoming Disney+ streaming service with original Star Wars content scheduled to launch in late 2019.

An anonymous reader writes from a report via RT: Julian Assange says Wikileaks will have "a very big year" as it will publish enough new information about Hillary Clinton to indict her. In an ITV interview about the Democratic presidential candidate, Assange said, "We have emails relating to Hillary Clinton which are pending publication." As it stands, about 32,000 emails from Clinton's private server have been leaked by Wikileaks. Assange has yet to comment on how many new emails will be released or when they will be published. While he thinks there will be enough to indict Clinton, he doesn't think it will happen under Attorney General Loretta Lynch. He does think "the FBI can push for concessions from the new Clinton government in exchange for its lack of indictment." Specifically, Assange revealed the leaked emails show that she overrode the Pentagon's reluctance to overthrow sovereign Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, and that "they predicted the post-war outcome would be what it is, which is ISIS taking over the country." Clinton's email controversy came to light in 2013 after a hacker named Guccifer breached her personal server.

HughPickens.com writes: Peter Moore has a fascinating article on BBC about how Admiral Robert FitzRoy, the man who invented the weather forecast in the 1860s faced skepticism and even mockery in his time but whose vision of a public forecasting service, funded by government for the benefit of all, is fundamental to our way of life. Chiefly remembered today as Charles Darwin's taciturn captain on HMS Beagle, during the famous circumnavigation in the 1830s, in his lifetime FitzRoy found celebrity from his pioneering daily weather predictions, which he called by a new name of his own invention — "forecasts". There was no such thing as a weather forecast in 1854 when FitzRoy established what would later be called the Met Office. With no forecasts, fishermen, farmers and others who worked in the open had to rely on weather wisdom — the appearance of clouds or the behavior of animals — to tell them what was coming as the belief persisted among many that weather was completely chaotic. But FitzRoy was troubled by the massive loss of life at sea around the coasts of Victorian Britain where from 1855 to 1860, 7,402 ships were wrecked off the coasts with a total of 7,201 lost lives. With the telegraph network expanding quickly, FitzRoy was able to start gathering real-time weather data from the coasts at his London office. If he thought a storm was imminent, he could telegraph a port where a drum was raised in the harbor. It was, he said, "a race to warn the outpost before the gale reaches them".

For FitzRoy the forecasts were a by-product of his storm warnings. As he was analyzing atmospheric data anyway, he reasoned that he might as well forward his conclusions — fine, fair, rainy or stormy — on to the newspapers for publication. "Prophecies and predictions they are not," he wrote, "the term forecast is strictly applicable to such an opinion as is the result of scientific combination and calculation." The forecasts soon became a quirk of this brave new Victorian society. FitzRoy's forecasts had a particular appeal for the horseracing classes who used the predictions to help them pick their outfits or lay their bets.

But FitzRoy soon faced serious difficulties. Some politicians complained about the cost of the telegraphing back and forth. The response to FitzRoy's work was the beginning of an attitude that we reserve for our weather forecasters today. The papers enjoyed nothing more than conflating the role of the forecaster with that of God and the scientific community were skeptical of his methods. While the majority of fishermen were supportive, others begrudged a day's lost catch to a mistaken signal. FitzRoy retired from his west London home to Norwood, south of the capital, for a period of rest but he struggled to recover and on 30 April 1865 FitzRoy cut his throat at his residence, Lyndhurst-house, Norwood, on Sunday morning. "In time, the revolutionary nature of FitzRoy's work would be recognised," says Moore. "FitzRoy's vision of a weather-prediction service funded by government for the benefit of its citizens would not die. In 1871, the United States would start issuing its own weather "probabilities", and by the end of the decade what was now being called the Met Office would resume its own forecasts in Britain."

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "NBC reports that flying instructors at Humberside Airport, near the city of Hull in northeast England, told a passenger who had never flown before how to land a four-seater Cessna 172 after the pilot collapsed and died at the controls. Passenger John Wildey explained to air traffic controllers that he had no flying experience and that the pilot could not control the plane. 'It came down with a bump, a bump, a bump, hit the front end down, I heard some crashing and it's come to a halt,' said Stuart Sykes. 'There were a few sparks and three or four crashes, that must have been the propeller hitting the floor. Then it uprighted again and it came to a stop.' Roads around the airport were closed while two incoming flights to the airport, from Scotland and the Netherlands, were delayed as a result of the incident. The passenger took four passes of the runway, and there were cheers from the control tower when it finally came to a halt on the ground. 'For somebody who is not a pilot but has been around airfields and been a passenger on several occasions to take control is nothing short of phenomenal," said Richard Tomlinson. "He made quite a good landing, actually,' added flight instructor Murray. 'He didn't know the layout of the airplane. He didn't have lights on so he was absolutely flying blind as well.'"

uglyduckling writes "A grassroots Facebook campaign has pushed the 1990s Rage Against the Machine song 'Killing in the Name Of' to the top of the British music charts for Christmas. The campaign was planned to prevent the X-Factor winner from charting Christmas number one, as has been the case for the past four years. It was supposedly a kick against the commercialism of Christmas and commercial dominance in the music scene, although Rage and the X-Factor winner Joe McElderry were actually signed to the same label. Despite this minor detail, it's interesting to note that this is the first song to reach the number one spot through downloads alone in the UK, and is a testament to the organizational power of social networking sites like Facebook. The Facebook group also asked for donations to charity, and has raised £70,000 for the homeless charity Shelter."