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Government Could Ban BBC From Showing Top Shows at Peak Times (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The BBC is on a collision course with the government over reported efforts to bar it from showing popular shows at peak viewing times. The culture secretary, John Whittingdale, is widely expected to ban the broadcaster from going head-to-head with commercial rivals as part of the BBC charter review. He is due to publish a white paper within weeks that will set out a tougher regime as part of a new royal charter to safeguard the service for another 11 years. ITV has complained about licence fee money being used to wage a ratings battle with it and other channels funded by advertising. A source at the BBC said the public would be deeply concerned if it were forced to move programmes such as Strictly Come Dancing, Doctor Who and Sherlock from prime time weekend slots.In some unrelated news, Clarkson, Hammond, and May are still figuring out the name for their new show.
the commercial guys don't seem to understand Netflix. No amount of bribing the Goberment is going to save them.
:T:R:A:N:S:
1) Name me a cheap PVR which replicates all video cassette functionality.
2) Apps / web sites are all less versatile than recording from broadcast.
3) The point in prime time is to offer something that everyone can watch at once as a social experience, e.g. to get to gether / to chat about the following day. The reason most programming is shit these days is that you don't put as much creative effort into something that's only going to be watched by half a million people instead of half the country.
tl;dr 100 crap choices are worse than a handful of good ones.
Anyway, this is just Tories being Tories: the State is something to sell to your friends, and taxes are something to channel to them for on-going maintenance of things that aren't allowed to fail.
to see the commercial broadcast channels encourage the government to push more viewers towards adopting online viewing. The notion of supporting something that benefits their ecosystem is going to look much better in hindsight. Netflix will be the beneficiary, even if they don't carry the displaced content.
Yep, that's their modus operandi alright. They want everything in the hands of their party donors and to rule the UK (or what remains of it) as their personal fiefdom.
What gets me is how supine the BBC is. Surely they know the person beating them about the head and body daily is going to kill them as soon as they think they can get away with it? Yet they bow and scrape, acquiesce, and attack the Labour party following Lynton Crosby's agenda to the letter.
George Osborne, the chancellor, apparently wants to take a slice of the Beeb's license fee to prop up the newspaper industry. That'd be the champion of the free market, then, attacking the Beeb which operates on a public service remit by cutting into its revenues and using a bit of corporate socialism to prop up a newspaper industry whose loyalty is to its rich, tax-dodging proprietors and which has little or no interest to fair or balanced reportage (but generally loves the Tories).
Don't even get me started on the NHS. The Conservative party wants all of the post-war (II) settlement gone to be replaced with rampant inequality.
The Conservatine party: taking the Great out of Great Britain and selling it off for pennies on the dollar.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce