Slashdot Mirror
BBC to Try TV On Demand
Shevek writes "The UK Independent newspaper is reporting on a new BBC trial: 'Later this month, the BBC will launch a pilot project that could lead to all television programmes being made available on the internet. Viewers will be able to scan an online guide and download any show. Programmes would be viewed on a computer screen or could be burned to a DVD and watched on a television set. Alternatively, programmes could be downloaded to a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) ... By launching iMP, the BBC hopes to avoid being left at the mercy of a software giant such as Microsoft, which could try to control the gateway to online television.' Yet more proof that the BBC license fee is an unmitigated Good Thing(TM)."
Who do I have to blow to work for a company that hands out PDAs with 512 meg CF to all its employees, just so they can watch TV at work!?
The BBC License Fee is great if it means that us Americans can get all that great programming without having to pay for it! :-)
TV on demand is the future, once you get a taste of it, it's hard to go back.. Luckily for the content providers, TIVO and ReplayTV have already demonstrated the market. Sure TIVO isn't really TV on demand, but it helped define the market.
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Hot deals!
the bbc already has a thing for the latest news, at reasonable quality. news.bbc.org.uk
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
I am not an active TV watcher - I have it on most of the time, but only passively. If I have to "make" it work by "demanding" it, I'm likely to find another source that's easier - a "flip-the-switch-and-go" kind of thing.
I lived in the UK for 4 years and just returned to Canada. I only wish the CBC was as good as the BBC. I do find their style of news to be way to similar to the big, sensational US news outlets but, otherwise, the content is great! Heck, I'd probably even pay my license fee from Canada!
Just to remind everyone, the BBC license fee is a tax on every television set in the UK.
(I don't live in the UK, but I would pay it if I could get this kind of innovation)
They'll go and use RealMedia or WMV and still be at the mercy of some other company.
I doubt they'll use XVID or other open standards. Would be fairly neutral if they released MPEG-2 files, however these would be gigantic.
The BBC will likely do something to limit the International use of this service, as having the shows freely availalbe over the Web might negatively impact their ability to sell their programs in other places, and some of the shows aired by the BBC belong to other companies and they want the exclusive rights to the show in their home territory.
The article refers to this being a challenge, but one they plan on getting over...
It is great to see a company that is willing to provide choice to its customers.
Perhaps this will force American media companies to offer a few better options to their customers.
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It's a considerable boon to the future of de-centralized media to see a company like the BBC giving this a shot. If Internet users can acclimate towards using an Internet-based tv show broadcasting service, that could put media in the hands of those that deserve it, rather than those that have money and/or are already established as major players in the media industry. i.e. web sites like Slashdot could begin to leverage their user-base into targetted commercial ads, allowing the formation of "television" style shows online. Plus, the last thing we need is a software company like MS in control of the media because it's software is the platform to connect to all the sundries of devices.
We are one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. Back to you with the weather, Bob!
This is an interesting move, especially considering the events transpiring regarding digital televion, TV ripping and the like. I find it refreshing and interesting that while the recording industries (namely the MPAA) push broadcast flag legislation through, in an attempt to end behavior like this, the BBC makes it computer viewable. Also, sites that are providing ED2K links and torrents to TV Rips are beginning to feel the wrath of the DMCA, so I wonder how much this will change things? Probably not much... but hey, I try to be optimistic.
But all TV programs are already available on the net,
#tv-torrents
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
That way I can watch just the BBC shows I like and only pay for what I want to watch.
;)
No more paying for Video Tape or DVD copies of BBC shows and waiting for them to ship. Just pay and download, and then burn my own copy to a Video CD or DVD disk. I guess they have controls so that only one copy can be burned?
Video Rental stores ought to get into this gig, get the license to distribute the movies digitally and sell them on their website.
Might as well, would be a much better quality than those idiots who bring video cameras to movie theatres and then upload those videos to file sharing networks.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
This will raise some intersting questions: Apart from resulting in nonTV owners (and hence non licience payers) accessing the BBC it would this not lead to much wider dissemination of the BBC TV outside the UK. Wouldn't this damage the existing syndication relationships that the BBC has set up. I am amased that any broadcaster risk distribution over the internet. Certainty thinking outside the box.
It's about time. The only way I watch TV any more is through downloads or season DVD's who has the time to play the network games when they bounce your favorite shows around every other week chasing ratings numbers.
We recently dropped our cable subscription down to the $10 /mth 19 channel deal, and we're thinking about dropping that. The problem is that we only ever watched one or two channels and we didn't get enough viewing time to make it worth our $99 /mth cable bill.
I would love to be able to just watch the shows that I want, when I want them, and pay strictly for what I watch. I don't want to pay for a bunch of crap I don't want. Why should I be forced to buy HGTV when I'm an overweight fat slob who spends 99% of his day behind a keyboard? All I wanted was Tech Tv (although it's gone downhill bigtime).
You might be interested in /.'s BBC coverage from last week then, in which the BBC has created an open source, wavelet-based codec which ramps from low to high throughput with better than MPEG2 video quality.
Even though I am American, I would happily pay the 121 pound annual license fee. IMHO, the BBC programming is much more intellectually stimulating, and costs far less, than cable/satellite TV in this country. Most of the shows I do actually watch are BBC productions that are airing on PBS.
"Teleporting Rodents with D-Cell Battery Displacement" theory -- IgnoramusMaximus (692000)
You don't need no restrictive technology to make money out of media content, just find an easy-to-use distribution vector and a fair price. Who will want to sweep through a couple of hundreds of low-res DiVx files on Kazaa to download a show when you can get it premium quality for a price this low?
I wonder what is the ROI (Return on Investment) of the boradcast flag when compared to this...No, you do not pay on how many TV tuners. You pay per household.
No, you don't have to pay for radio anymore. Radio makes up less than 1% of the BBCs total spending, so I guess they figured the cost of billing people for radios was over the amount they'd actually get.
Also, portable TVs are exempt from the license.
IntechHosting - Free domain, 2GB, PHP, £4.95/$8.95
I'm a big fan of BBC programming and reguarly download it from the Usenet currently (recent favorites: The Office and The Worst Week of My Life). Because this is based on UK licensing fees, I wonder if it will be available to those of us in the rest of the world? Or perhaps we can pay a small fee to be able to download these episodes as well? This is the way I hope TV is going. My schedule is such that I am in bed before most of the prime time TV is on so the only way to watch it is to download it (or get one of those TiVOs).
TV and teeth on demand! How the hell did they lose the empire?
why not provide shows on bit torrent?
is it because it's harder to advertise?
would people be offended by short adverts played at the beginning of the video files? (eg This Bit Torrent file is brought to you by...)
networks could distribute the seeds across their affiliates to reduce bandwidth cost, etc.
This is The Independent, one of the major newspapers in the UK. That's like mirroring the New York Times.
Yet more proof that the BBC license fee is an unmitigated Good Thing(TM).
Just a pity they can't leave people the fuck alone if they don't want it.
A couple of days ago, I clicked to view a video on BBC news website and it told me that I have to buy a subscription as international user. I was a bit surprised since so far, BBC had been free and even free from ads.
This page says that: "Broadband video news from the BBC is only available to international users by subscription. Find out how to get the latest broadband video news from the BBC here.
It doesn't explicitly say, but the tone of the article suggests that the BBC's mentality is not much different from the **AA bunch.
"If we don't enter this market, then exactly what happened to the music industry could happen to us... everybody starts posting the content up there and ripping us off."
What would be wrong with the public freely sharing the content? They are subsidizing the creation of it with their tax payments.
Why don't allegedly "public" broadcasters, like the BBC in Brittan or PBS or NPR in the US, produce and release content under Creative Commons type, or other Free licences? That way the public could use, share, and redistribute the content freely. People could even re-edit the content and create new and interesting works. Wouldn't that be a good thing? Isn't the idea behind public broadcasting to serve the public, instead of seek profits?
Instead, the "public" broadcasters have developed the same control-freak mentality of the rest of the media that effectively opposes the very idea of a public domain and favors every byte having a DRM restricted ownership sticker. If that is the case, what is the point of the public subsidizing these broadcasters... and why should they even exist?
> Yet more proof that the BBC license fee is an unmitigated Good Thing(TM).
WHY OH WHY are the only fuckers who realise this not resident in the UK? the public tide in this country (UK) is more anti than pro, and Labour/TB have been doing their level best to destroy the BBC's credibility*.
I on the other hand am very pro-BBC. The only slight problem I have with it is that the fee is the same for everybody (i.e. a poll tax).
* Whether or not Andrew Gilligan exaggerated his story, the government (and Alistair Campbell non-gov) made an enormous issue out of it in order to discredit the BBC, as the charter is coming up for renewal soon. The bastards.
SURELY NOT!!!!!
from8 / :
http://p2p.weblogsinc.com/entry/672947338275913
The most significant revelations were concerning the protection of the content. All content will be DRM'd, only available for a limited period time, once downloaded. As expected, it will also only be available to UK broadband users. In a break with the BBC's long-standing support of Real, Microsoft DRM will be used for the technical trial, but it appears that no final decision has been made.
As was known previously, the EPG (Electronic Programming Guide) will cover fourteen days; seven looking forward and seven backward. The programs that have been broadcasted will be downloadable to the computer simply by clicking on them. A preview of a piece can be watched before committing to download a complete show.
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
I don't want to split hairs here; but it's the British Broadcasting "Corporation" not *company. And they aren't even a corporation in that sense. They are a governmental body, funded through the TV licence in the UK.
In other words, it isn't a "company" bringing us this innovation it's the socialistic government enterprise of an advanced european welfare-state.
No, this isn't a communist vs capitalist troll, it's just an area where capitalist media organisations (in their current incarnation) just have too much inertia to innovate like this.
And it's worth remembering, sometimes paying taxes to a government body (a properly set up one) gets you a kick-arse service, and a whole heap of kudos and nods from the rest of the world. Why go for laize-faire capitalism or stalinistic dictatorship.... when you can have the mix of both as you choose. And the evidence seems to be that it's better to pay more taxes than most of us do.
RULE BRITANNIA!!
Man, I hope this catches on in the U.S. with cable stations like Comedy Central and the Sci-Fi Channel. Those two and a handful of others are the only reason I still subscribe to cable. And it pisses me off to no end that I have to pay $40/month for a "standard package" which includes 60 or so channels I DON'T watch.
Individual cable broadcast companies taking this initiative will bring about the same effect as the a la carte cable service many Americans have been asking for. Anyone with broadband Internet access will have access to only the shows they want, on demand, and priced individually.
"Where do you think "The Weakest Link" and "Coupling" came from?"
And, "Who Wants to be a Millionaire," "Men Behaving Badly," "Dear John," etc. Then you could add failed Americanized pilots of British shows such as "The Office," "Red Dwarf," and "AbFab." Wasn't there an American version of "Faulty Towers" too?
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
There seem to be quite a few Americans here who think BBC produces better quality programs than US tv. But remember, when you view something from abroad, it is usually selected because it is the cream of the crop, it does not nessesarily reflect the overall quality of BBC television. I'm sure few of you would care to see hours of snooker or cricket. Likewise, foreign countries usually buy the best American shows. Foreigners who only see the Sopranos, West Wing, etc. may conclude that US tv is of pretty high quality.
Great, now I can start another lost episode of Dr. Who, when ever I want.
-Patrick
"They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."
Isn't the BBC some kind of socialist, government supported thing?
I thought only free-market, capitalist companies in competion innovated? That's what I was taught in my American public school. There's just no reason to improve if you've got a steady, government supported income. You have to be in blood thirsty battle for market dominance to justify doing anything other than resting on your laurels and IP rights. Right?
Where's the innovation in product from the American networks?
Where's customer focus from American media?
Where's the desire to satisfy customer desire in America?
(It's sarcasm. I love my country.)
Terrestrial channels are: BBC One, BBC Two, ITV, Channel 4 and five.
BBC One & Two are paid for from the licence fee. ITV and five are fully commercial stations. Channel 4 pumps its profits back into production (AFAIK).
We have satellite TV (Sky) which has literally hundreds of channels. We have British equivalents of HBO (Sky Movies) and ESPN (Sky Sports).
Cable provides most satellite channels.
A full list of all satellite channels aimed at the UK audience si available at Lyngsat. In addition, you can also pick up hundreds of European channels.
Father Ted is Channel 4. BBC America distributes it under license. Incidentally, C4 is also partially publicly funded and has a public service remit, though they show ads unlike the beeb.
*But* stop wasting the license fee on silly shit like this and get us Premiership Football back on our screens. When I can settle down to Liverpool vs. Middlesborough without having the dread hand of Robert Murdoch in my wallet, then we can talk innovation and about a shiny bright little future.
The BBC have no sense of what the priorities of 30 million of their customers are.
Plays violent online games as: Nerfherder76
Policies
Advertising
The BBC is not permitted to carry advertising or sponsorship on its public services. This keeps them independent of commercial interests and ensures they can be run instead to serve the general public interest.
If the BBC sold airtime either wholly or partially, advertisers and other commercial pressures would dictate its programme and schedule priorities. There would also be far less revenue for other broadcasters.
The BBC is financed instead by a TV licence paid by households. This guarantees that a wide range of high quality programmes can be made available unrestricted to everyone.
The licence fee also helps support production skills, training, local or minority programmes and other services which might not otherwise be financed by the economics of pay-TV or advertising.
The BBC runs additional commercial services around the world. These are not financed by the licence fee but are kept quite separate from its public services. Profits are used to help keep the licence fee low so that UK licence fee payers can benefit commercially from their investment in programmes.
BBC
Even though a lot of popular American programs are available illegally on the net, there isn't currently a reliable way to get BBC-produced TV programs (although I'm sure they do exist, they're just nowhere near as common). Even if they were though, the fact remains that most current TV downloads are illegal. As a BBC license-fee payer, I would love to be able to obtain episodes legally like this, and it's good to see that the BBC seems to have their customers interests in mind.
and if this is the best way to get it, I'm all for it.
BBC - PLEASE make EE available via a pay-for mechanism (reasonable pricing please!) to those of us outside the UK. Your namesake BBCAmerica has seen fit to cancel it last year, ensuring that pretty much everything on that channel is something they can rerun 100 times a month (changing rooms, ground force, etc). If they could rerun one month of news programming for a full year to keep costs down they'd probably do that too.
I'm sure there are *many* people outside the UK willing to pay $150/year for downloadable EE.
(I can't believe Laura just died either!)
What I don't get is with programs like EE, why *not* sell them online? They're just sitting on a shelf. It's just something which is costing them money to archive, and it's never replayed again (maybe on UK Gold now, but certainly not anywhere outside the UK on a regular basis).
creation science book
"Extracting a tax for simply owning a television set creates a captive audience and the quality of the programming suffers as a result. For every Monty Python's Flying Circus there are countless shows that wouldn't make it past the pilot phase here in the states. If the quality of programming on BBC-america is any indication, brits are being robbed."
And you think the quality of programming is better and fair? Last time I checked online, we had a great show on the WB Network that was cancelled despite increased ratings and a rabid fan base. That show was called "Angel." The American system is a joke. 6,000 homes participating in the idiotic Nielsen's system is considered more accurate (when they write things down by pencil and paper) over 1 million homes with TiVos that report even show (and commercial) watched? I would gladly pay fees to make sure my programs remain on the air instead of watching the entire TV land become the 24 hour bastion of "reality" programming. If anything, its us Americans who are being robbed.
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
Extracting a tax for simply owning a television set...
As has been pointed out in other threads, the licence is for as many TVs as you like in a single household, NOT per TV.
You should see the (lack of) quality on our major commercial analogue channels then; one wants to be a 24x7 soap/Hitler/pr0n/US TV Movies channel, and the other is dumbed-down sensationalist news/soap/reality TV/blockbuster hollywood movies.
Only Channel 4 has any quality programmes that compare with the BBC's, and lots of those are being bought in from the likes of the Discovery and History channels these days (it's easy to tell them from the programmes they make themselves as the bought-in programmes repeat themselves every 5-10 minutes for where the ad. breaks would be).
I'm curious about something, and maybe some of you british slashdotters can answer some questions for me. What else is there on the air other than the BBC?
BBC1: soap, blockbuster films, major sporting/cultural events, sport, investigative journalism, news, popular comedy, minority sports (e.g. darts, snooker). Funded by licence fee.
BBC2: documentaries, arts, investigative journalism, economics/finance, science, history, art/cult films, new comedy. Funded by licence fee.
ITV: soap, reality TV, sport, blockbuster films, sport, sensationalist news, regional content. Privately owned and funded exclusively by advertising.
Channel 4:much like BBC2, but more mainstream content (e.g. some soaps). Minority sports include horse racing and various non-European sports. Publically owned, but funded exclusively by advertising.
Channel 5:soap, Hitler documentaries, softcore pr0n, old blockbusters, US TV movies. Privately owned, funded by advertising (and deep pockets, since the last I heard, it wasn't doing very well).
With Freeview (free-of-subscription charge digital TV), you get BBC News 24, The History Channel, Parliament, CBeebies (kids TV) and some ITV and BBC channels mostly used for repeats right now. Oh, and the usual set of home shopping channels and suchlike.
How many channels do brits generally have to choose from?
I would guess most AB social class homes only have the five broadcast analogue channels I described earlier, or maybe Freeview.
Is cable TV common, and if so what kind of channels are there on it?
Other social classes are more likely to have Murdoch-owned SkyTV with programming most North Americans would be familiar with, I'm sure - Fox, SciFi, Nick, etc.
Do you get HBO?
Channel 4 and, especially, Channel 5 show quite a lot of HBO-sourced material. I think HBO is available from Sky.
ESPN?
Sports? Dunno. A lot of the content wouldn't be of much interest in the UK. Soccer has a much bigger following here than American Football, Basketball, etc. and SkySports + BBC + ITV cover that well.
I was told when I was a little kid that the BBC was the ONLY channel available over there. I find that hard to believe. Imagine if the only channel americans had to watch was PBS.
No, that's absolutely correct. We don't have running water, sanitation, or electricity either. Also, we all have tea with the Queen each week, after kissing her feet. ;-)
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Of course lots of the good programs could never get shown on broadcast TV in the USA - they freak out over a single female nipple after all.
Indeed. Well spotted to all those chimps that pointed out that BBC stands for "British Broadcasting Corporation". 10/10 for general knowledge and 5/10 for understanding.
:)
The BBC is operated under two constitutional documents: its Royal Charter and the Licence and Agreement. The Charter defines the BBC's objects, powers, obligations and the sources and uses of its income, while the Licence and Agreement sets the terms and conditions under which it must operate.
"Subject to the general law of the land and the provisions of the Charter and the Licence and Agreement, the BBC has full editorial and managerial independence in its day-to-day programme and other activities"
For more information visit this terribly informative site, which will doubtless also explain all about impartiality and public service broadcasting for you.
ITYM 'Come on US! Get a proper welfare state and join the rest of the western world.'
The western world includes the US, Canada, Western Europe and (probably) Australia and New Zealand. Of the above, how many don't have socialised healthcare?
I should point out the UK Writers Guild (not the American Writers Guild) is extremely pissed off about this move, because writers won't be getting repeat fees (which can be a large source of income). However, the British Guild has far less power than the American one, meaning not much action can take place over the programmes on demand...
Surely there is a major risk the BBC is exposing itself to here... if the trial is successful, and the BBC decides to go 'on demand', who will need a TV anymore? If people can just download a program, then they don't need a TV to watch it. If people stop needing TV's, then no licence fee is payable in the UK, and the BBC stops receiving most of its money.
How would the BBC solve this? Argue for a PC Licence?!? This would be very untenable as a PC has so many more uses then a TV.
Would the BBC website become a members only pay site, and then be in breach of its charter?
The Norwegian Broadcast Company (NRK, similar license model as BBC) has done something similar for a while now. All the programs they produce inhouse is aired live online, and is also stored in the archive. so you can access it whenever you like.
For the moment this is free for everybody (registration required though), and can be reached abroad (handy for me as an exchange-student in the UK).
-- If ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people?
>what are the problems with it that make people in Britain so reluctant to join?
The EU needs to be large in order to be effective. However, the enlargement drains the larger economies to benefit of the smaller ones. At this moment, the UK economy is the strongest in Europe (Germany is still struggling with the deadweight of reunification).
Previous attempts at economic glue - viz the exchange rate mechanism - placed enormous strain on the UK and showed just how unbalanced things are.
Another problem to manifest is the ludicrous inflation Ireland experienced (which they appear willing to endure as they really *do* benefit from the EU slush funds they're using to build roads).
The very *last* member of the EU to "cry foul" when things are going seriously wrong is the UK - too much of this stiff upper lip nonsense.
The EU *needs* the economic resources of the UK but very few other members (particularly not the French, who're the ultimate driving force behind the EU) will think twice about enacting legislation which hurts the UK if it benefits themselves.
Increasing numbers of people in the UK are simply brassed off because this is *supposed* to be a two-way street.