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44 Comments
- DigitAl56K, on 10/12/2007, -0/+26I lived in the UK until I was 22. I can honestly say that while living there I found the TV license to be an appauling concept, but having lived in the US for three years I would dearly love to go back to paying the license fee instead of putting up with American television.
What you will get with ad-supported programming:
* Ads every 10 minutes
* Ads between the end of the show and the credits (wtf btw?!)
* Shows that allow for generating the highest ad revenue will get the most air time, no matter how bad they are. The BBC will not be able to produce quality programming because doing so will naturally lower it's budget.
* To keep you in front of your TV, earning the BBC ad revenue, not only will the standard of programming drop, but more channels will be invented just to give you more choice (not because there is a greater availability of high quality content - the opposite will be true), so that you're less likely to leave your seat.
* To maximize the cost vs revenue from high-earning shows there will be frequent reruns. Again, notice that high-earning does not equal high quality or intellectually stimulating.
* Mainstays of the BBC, such as quality independant news coverage will dissappear over time as advertisers demand a less politically disruptive presentation and the BBC becomes more and more dependant on ad revenue.
We like to complain in Great Britain, but you really don't know what you've got 'till it's gone, and with TV licenses once it's gone it may not come back. I recommend anyone who is a strong advocate of dispelling the license spend a month or two in the US. Also, to the US readers among us, please realise that I am not trying to bash you hear or make any kind of statement around your intelligence, merely that quality programming in the US is severely lacking, especially with respect to news.
I believe a TV license is still much cheaper than $50/mo for basic cable on Time Warner or the like (perhaps someone with more information can do the math). - lahar, on 10/12/2007, -0/+18You miss the point. The BBC is funded largely by licensing fees. If you are a brit with a tv, the BBC gets cash from you (or you risk a large fine).
While the BBC's internet site isn't seen on a television, I think it is still quite ridiculous for them to put ads on it when their revenue is forced out of the populace. - tendonut, on 10/12/2007, -0/+16They are afraid that BBC will turn into another CNN/Fox News/MSNBC where, as stated in the article, there will be more "fluffy news" like celebrity marriages and adoptions, rather than the more important news like poverty in Africa. BBC is very respectable when it comes to what they cover.
- Hoovooloo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+15@giantAppleCore-
The problem is, they are a journalistic organization. Ad money is based hits. thus, money from ads would encourage them to move from a pure journalistic organization to a more sensationalistic group. Just look at CNN.com. - TrevorBradley, on 10/12/2007, -0/+15I believe there are no ads on the BBC stations. And you *must* pay to get BBC if you own a TV.
I am not a Brit, just from one of the colonies. ;) Can someone verify this for me? - omaryak, on 10/12/2007, -1/+12But on the flip side, having the BBC as a world resource enhances the UK's reputation in the world. What is available to international users is not as extensive as UK offerings, which include more broadband features. If the BBC were subject to the commercial pressures of ordinary television, it would not be the outstanding institution that it is. But I don't oppose their allowing international users to pay in to UK offerings so that there is equal opportunity to enjoy premium content.
- SanchoPanzer, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11Anyone from the UK that thinks the BBC sucks has never lived overseas. The licence fee is incredible value for money. As for the ads on the BBC site - naaa, not at all.
- Runfree, on 10/12/2007, -4/+14As a UK resident, I would add that the BBC are draconian in their approach to enforce the licence fee, using air time on tv and radio to repeatedly remind us to pay and the consequences (large fine, criminal record etc) if we don't, while paying favoured employees exorbitant salaries. If you choose not to own a telly, they then come to your house to check that there is no telly, and the socket is not set up to receive transmissions - ridiculous but true, for it happened to me when I went (very happily) without tv for 18 months.
Even if people never watch a single BBC programme, favouring the other channels, we still have to pay the fee.
It's time that the BBC did use all the revenue it seems to raise through merchandise, and now through advertising, to become a commercial enterprise, or alternatively, set up a way for people to block the BBC channels so that a tv can be owned without having to buy a licence if they prefer not to watch BBC. - twistedonion, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7The BBC should never use advertising to create revenue. It is a public service. Each licence fee owner should have a unique members login. only paying members will receive the service.
the minute you start advertising is the minute you lose impartiality.
To those who complain about the fee just look state side. TV is ***** over there. The BBC is by far the best broadcaster on the planet. Something we should be really proud of. If anything, public broadcasting ensures an impartiality in the reporting of news that you just don't get anywhere else. - AngryPunk, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7Hey, I like M.A.S.H.
- ZenMojo, on 10/12/2007, -3/+9It's basically PBS that they force you to pay for just by having a TV. Unfortunately, PBS isn't anywhere near as cool as the BBC.
- RickySan65, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6No ads (yet) on the BBC..
- YellowBook, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5The irony is, if you live abroad having not contributed finanically in any way, you can receive all the BBC channels on TV. radio and the web absolutely free.
I am a UK citizen and live abroad a lot of the year and am grateful for this but it doesn't seem economically fair that the service should be globally subsidised by one subset of customers who are *forced* to pay whether they want to watch the BBC or not.
- gargantuan, on 10/12/2007, -3/+9Those who are willing to sacrifice their freedom, don't deserve it. And those who are willing to sacrifice the BBC should be rounded up and killed before anyone starts listening to their crap and the last remaining jewel in the British crown in pulled out, carved up and handed out to the souless TV drones who are always circling, waiting to cram it full of adverts and reality tv and pop idol and all that other crap.
Hell really is other people! - mofomojo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5I think the greater irony is the stake that television stations have in the Internet. I go on the Internet to get information otherwise unavailable on the TV, not the same. Watching video and getting the EXACT same information on the internet makes the world wide web entirely pointless, in my opinion. The Internet was and is not designed to replace Television, and does not have the neccesary infrastructure to do it since most lines have bandwith limits. On that note, that was why the Internet isn't like a big truck and is more like a series of tubes, when you broadcast a video on YouTube, and it is viewed 100 000 times - that video needs to be sent across the Internet 100 000 times. Whereas on TV, if you broadcast something, it's only sent across the network once. The lines have bandwidth limits, as far as I know. Even if they are grossly huge limits, they still do have limits on how much information can be sent and recieved.
The need for ads, in this matter, is pressing to pay for the bandwidth costs of the BBC. Which is the only reason I can understand, here. At http://www.bbc.co.uk/info/licencefee/#spent, it explains exactly how these licenses are spent. None of that cost includes networking costs for the BBC.co.uk website. I've seen the website, it's nice. It's got video and a lot of cool other features, too. The cost required to pay an ISP to support these is not cheap, especially for the kind of traffic the BBC gets.
Naturally, the BBC is in quite a dilemma, even if their workers do get large salaries, the money collected from the TV licenses is not used for the website and is not budgeted to be used as such.
Hopefully, for the British, the whole affair will be sorted out and the website will be taken into account their next budget of the TV Licenses. And yes, Television is far superior in Britain than in the United States. If you guys had it corporate, your greats like Monty Python would've been replaced with cheesy sitcoms like M.A.S.H. or Three's Company. For the love of god, be thankful. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Scaremongering !!!!!!
Jesus just look at Fox, if the BBC heads down that slippy slope I'm gone.
Nope, no ads, the one single greatest TV broadcaster in the world would be thrown to the dogs.
Never.
Foe example: March of the Penguins.
A hit film in the U.S., simply a nature program made to the highest quality.
We take programs of a far higher quality for granted, the output of the BBC's nature section and David Attenboroughs output simply blow the likes of March of the Penguins out of the water.
Yet we take it for granted.
If advertising creeps into one section of the BBC, you can eventually kiss the lot goodbye and welcome England's new Fox TV. - jambox, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4yeah anyone wanting see something that makes March of the Penguins look incredibly boring, go buy a DVD of the eye-wateringly spectacular BBC show, Planet Earth.
You would never, ever, ever get that on a Murdoch channel. - TrevorBradley, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4During a labour lockout, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) outsourced their website to a third party, who put ads on the site. When the lockout was resolved, the ads stayed.
It was around this time that I installed Adblock. ;)
It's still a decent site for news though: http://www.cbc.ca/news/ - Boeing, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4"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."
Amen.
From the BBC themselves: http://www.bbc.co.uk/info/policies/advertising.shtml - jambox, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4the licence fee works out at about £15 per month, or about $25.
Please do bear in mind, it's not just the TV! You get a huge range of radio stations too (compare the breadth of content to commercial stations) and of course the very fine BBCi website - anyone not aware of it, it's really very good and very large. - Raithmir, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I feel a lot of UK posters have missed the following line from the article...
"the ads will be visible only to readers outside Britain" - RickySan65, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Half Jonathan Woss's salary, then they don't need to sell advertising on the BBC site
- tizz66, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I sat down to watch March of the Penguins the other day, expecting something spectacular - after all, it was a hit film! I was kind of disappointed, because as you say, we get nature programmes of that quality all the time. I guess to the rest of the world it's something different.
- twistedonion, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3"Additionally staff in BBC News are not used to the realities of running a business"
The reality is that the BBC is not a business, nor should it be. It is a public service and should be run as such. - jambox, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I agree fully. I think if youre not paying the licence fee, the least you can do is scroll over a few ads.
Anyway, I think Google have shown that advertising on the web isn't like on tv, it doesn't have to be intrusive. - zadadka, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Just to clarify :
The BBC gains revenues from the TV License Authority (which is administered by the BBC).
The TV License is required under UK Law for the "receiving of television broadcast" on whatever equipment, so even if you *never* watch a BBC channel (and could prove it), irrelevant, the annual license is still required.
Source: http://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/information/index.jsp
If you think they're as mad as hatters, note that blind people can have a whole 50% concession on the annual price...but only pay £5 if in Residential care.....go figure. - FuzzyCat, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2
Right, you've done it now.
BBC 3 is a sack of *****. All the programs on BBC 3 would have gone onto bbc1 and bbc 2 (bbc 3 only starts at 7pm). Because of bbc 3 there are huge holes in the bbc 1 and bbc 2 schedules which they have to fill with 3000 year old episodes of 'The Good Life', 'Open All Hours' and 15 trillion episodes of 'The weakest link' .
The other day they even put an advert for the Electronic Proms into the news.. it's not news you retards. Some dickhole at the BBC also thinks that the news needs to be jazzed up and any petty little story pumped up to be something that it's not... I'm telling you people it's pissing me off. I want FACTUAL news not some asshat giving me what they *think* I want.
Oh, and another thing, stop showing that ***** 'Strictly Come Dancing' - it's *****, really ass gapingly *****.
...and yet, there's nothing you can do about it... What? turn over to a different channel? Aside from the fact that most of that is ***** too, you still have to pay to NOT watch the BBC..
Oh and don't tell me there are no ads on the BBC - there are, they just advertise their own stuff...
And after all that I wouldn;t be without it.
Why?
You only need to watch 30 seconds of ITV to know why. - twistedonion, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"Sorry twistedonion, but if an organisation establishes a tariff for it's services, it's a business. "
So you consider the NHS to be a business? And the publicly funded education system? True, they are run like businesses these days, and imho that is why we see a decline in quality. Difference of opinion then but the devil is in the details. The BBC is a publicly funded corporation, therefore in my opinion it may be a business but not in the true sense of the word. The BBC does not exist to make profit, but to act as a service for it's owners - the British taxpayer. - ArnoldTPants, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1>which they say could lead to less serious journalism and damage the BBC’s reputation.
That has already been done. BBC execs already admitted promoting left-wing views and their bias against Christianity and the US.
http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2006/oct/06102401.html
Now they want to pretend like they have integrity? LOL. - zadadka, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Sorry twistedonion, but if an organisation establishes a tariff for it's services, it's a business.
The License Fee is one tariff....the leasing of programme and content to other countries is another tariff....for example.
It's a business. - icefitz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I don't care about the adds on the CBC site. Recently though they put an add in the middle of the frigging articles. It was so ***** ridiculous i had to use a user defined css to hide the DIV holding the add.
I can tolerate adds to a certain extent but as more and more adds appear on a publicly funded organizations website and they interfere with the content it starts to get out of hand. - twistedonion, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Just wanted to add that I think an approach that should be considered for non UK site users is a subscription fee. Charge $5 per month for access to "premium" content. At least that way the BBC keeps within it's remit - "free from both political and commercial influence and answers only to its viewers and listeners"
- andyc, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1bbc.co.uk (and its bandwidth costs) will be part of the "New Media" allocation of 36p out of £10.54 of the license fee. If that's no longer enough I think that delivering ads to those outside the UK, using a similar system to what they currently use to only allow us Brits to watch the TV programmes on broadband, is a perfect solution.
- johnrees, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I live in Spain and listen to BBC over the net frequently. Or try to.
Recently I find it almost impossible to get a stable feed from anything other than World Service using Windows Media
I suspect that BBC have restricted bandwidth to overseas users. Does anybody know if that's the case. Or is it something local?
It would be really helpful to know before I go chasing my local ISP to fix a problem which isn't theirs. Other sites and other streaming audio seem to work fine.
Thanks in advance - joehodgson, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2We have to pay for a lisence just for the privelage of owning a TV, all cos the BBC want to remain independent and ad-free, its the equivelant of about $130 a year(!)
If the BBC want to run online ads then they should scrap the fee we all have to pay and become a commercial channel or a subscription channel, at least that way you could choose whether to pay for the service or not rather than being threatened by countless adverts on tv, radio, internet etc. - geekchic, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2While I like the ad free ethos of the BBC as it is - I also consider it just scaremongering to suggest that the ad sales team would be able to influence the journalists.
I run a news publication, and I use 3rd party agencies to manage the ad sales. That maintains a good "chinese wall" between sales and content.
Most news publications work the same way.
I actually once had an advertiser contact me asking to have their ads removed from a story which was critical of their company. I said the only way to do that was to cancel their entire advertising account. They would have lost just as much as I did had they done that.
Scandals sells newspapers - I can earn far more by being independent of advertisiers than by turn a publication into liitle more than a PR machine. That is the same for any publication frankly. - unit46, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Firstly I think it important to just restate quickly the aims of a commercial bbc.co.uk and that is to recoup the costs that UK license fee payers spend on providing the service to international users. Almost half of all traffic to BBC.co.uk is from outside the UK and UK license fee payers currently subsidize this.
Secondly, a commercial version of bbc.co.uk is unlikely to be a fundamentally different offering to the public service non-ad carrying site. The reason being that the same content and editorial teams will most likely be responsible for both sites. My understanding is that the comercial site will be run by BBC Worldwide (a totally separate operating entity from the BBC). The Chinese wall between content origination versus commercial exploitation ambitions remain enforce.
Thirdly, there is a lot of scaremongering (as previously stated happening). Driven mostly by the folks within the News division. Its well known that within the BBC the News teams are pretty much a law unto themselves (anyone remember the Hutton inquiry). The reason for News people having such strong views is out of a misguided sense of editorial integrity being impacted (which clearly it wont as long as news is created for the domestic market in the first instance). Additionally staff in BBC News are not used to the realities of running a business - that is they have never had to account for what the actually spend in light of the value they return to the organization.
A commercial proposition puts into strong contrast the justification of an international facing service that can substantiate its existence along revenue lines versus a service that is lofty in ideal but fundamentally has never had to provide measurable value back to license payers when particularly when the primary purpose of the BBC is fist and foremost to delivery a quality offering to the UK population and not provide a "free" service internationally. - jga05, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1As an American that has lived overseas, I greatly appreciated the BBC. Especially since it was in English. Anyways, I will say that the BBC has great programming, but the idea of having to pay per TV is foreign to me. (No pun intended). At about 180 pounds a year for our 5 TVs that would be 900 pounds for my house a year. That's an insane amount of money. That could be two computers, 3 iPods, a down payment on a car. I don't mind having to watch 3 minutes of commercials for every 10 minutes of programming. It keeps my personal costs low, allows me to be able to afford to have multiple TVs, I can get up and use the bathroom if need be, make a quick phone call, and keeps programming edgy. We also have 200 channels to choose from. I disagree that its all *****, especially since we export shows like LOST and CSI that are megahits around the globe. Both of those shows are aired on broadcast channels completely free of charge. They are also available on ABC's and CBS's websites for free, respectively. The U.S. is just a bigger country that's much more diversified than say the U.K. We have 300 million people, naturally there will be more interests. If the BBC were to show advertisements, I'm sure that programming would not suffer. You Brits are used to a certain level of television, and I'm sure you wouldn't go down without a fight.
- albertross, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0for PLANS to put ads on website.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -8/+2PBS doesn't force every brit to pay for them now do they?
beat cha ;) - spinningobo, on 10/12/2007, -12/+3solution:get a dvr.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -12/+2Do they have ads on BBC stations? Then why the fuss over the website?
- giantAppleCore, on 10/12/2007, -16/+2Indeed, ads which can give employees raises. I'd imagine that a site as big as the bbc could bring in well over $100,000 a month, which any business would be stupid not to take with such a little cost.
- mc7winkie, on 10/12/2007, -27/+1Sheesh. You damn Brits it's only ads. Not full fledged pornography.
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