Here's why Whittingdale kicked a subscription BBC into the future

Re: A TV tax based on income?!

I guess it goes like this : you stop paying BBC directly and instead BBC is subsidised, to the tune of £4bln, from your taxes. Well, they might not admit it, but this is how it would end up at the end.

Re: How much for

Although the TV License covers TV, radio and online, it's only required if you do, or have the capability to watch live BBC broadcasts. If you've just got a radio then AFAIK nothing....

Re: How much for

Careful! Subscribe to that, and you'll suddenly see a lot more crap and correspondingly less good stuff on Radio 3.

I'd go for Radios 3 and 4. And I'd pay double to be spared some of the others, like Radio 2 inflicted on us by builders.

Re: Licence 'rewording" required?

The BBC lost 150 million this year, as this trend (which has been known about for a while) has happened more quickly than was expected.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/bbc-axe-1000-jobs-searing-5987176

Re: Licence 'rewording" required?

This is exactly what my brother did after the TV licensing people sent him a threatening letter. He'd always paid his fee up until that point.

Re: Licence 'rewording" required?

This is something being specifically enabled as requiring the license in the new "deal" the BBC is getting from the government. It won't make any difference but it is possible. Presumably they'll force you to enter a TV license number to access iPlayer and restrict simultaneous usage.

Re: Licence 'rewording" required?

And you can get paid subs for t'internet, like wot those Netflix and Amazon chappies do.

Seems to me someone could work out something like plumbing your license number into the iplayer and getting access to everything on one IP at a time (to reduce the benefit of sharing your license# with pals) and people without licenses could pay for individual programs/channels/series to be streamed as they wanted, charged pro-rata in line with the BBC's own published viewing figures for their programs/channels or something

Re: Licence 'rewording" required?

Yes, that is what you are allowed to do. Is it an important issue? Well the BBC (and the Government) think so as that was part of the review of the licence fee and one of the factors that triggered it.

Less percentage of the population are paying a licence fee and a large part of that group are people who only use 'catch up' for their viewing.

The ability to require a licence for using catch-up would required a change in the law and so it is part of the negotiations.

Re: Licence 'rewording" required?

As an honest no TV license holder my understanding is the viewer needs to pay to watch anything real-time or within one hour of broadcast regardless of the medium.

Luckily for me I think 99.5% of TV is risable so I'm happy to wait infinity or maybe the odd clip on youtube a year or so later. I wouldn't touch iplayer in case I slipped up.

I'm heavily against taxing the device as it is levied on an assumption that everyone is a dishonest TV watching sheep. Some of us love to learn and there is precious little to learn from most TV content.

I know the propaganda machine needs us to watch TV so I guess mine will be a voice in the wilderness. As part of the justification for device tax new meme will start, "those who don't watch telly must be off interfering with goats" or similar.

Re: Licence 'rewording" required?

This is exactly what I do - watch TV on catchup (nothing live) and hence pay no license fee.

Re: "Other countries are bounding ahead"

My understanding from the article was that:

- the government would provide funding for services that benefited the whole of the country (examples given of news and children's TV but not necessarily limited to that)

- further services would then need to be provided by a subscription service

- the current DVB-T hardware does not have uniform hardware support for hardware necessary to support a subscription model

- DVB-T2/HEVC is a EU standard and moving to this would allow the introduction of hardware to support subscriptions as a standard in addition to supporting 4K

Personally I believe the BBC needs to change and has needed to for some time - not so much through the current, apparent political conflict but more due to the changing nature of their audience and competing services.

Younger audiences (16-24) watch significantly less TV content than older audiences across all UK channels and have been for some time as this is beginning to affect the older demographics as well (i.e. 25-34).

Combined with BT/Sky's competition of new series and sporting events, the BBC stands to become left behind unless the change how they deliver and charge for their content.

Re: "Other countries are bounding ahead"

Agreed.... the discussion should primarily be about content, AND developing delivery methods that align with changing 'generational' viewing methods.

One example of this can be seen with sky news, that now streams to Youtube.

Once the content (and quality of it) is established...... the cost is pretty much pre-determined.

So what about concentrating on a broad range of interesting/intelligent/educational programs, and leave the general entertainment garbage to commercial channels, who are anyway doing that kind of stuff.

While the garbage might be cheapish to make... the scale of offerings demand a huge BBC administration.

Slimming the BBC down, to concentrate on the described content, would ensure that there would still be a channel or two that offers stimulating broadcasts IE. ensuring that Britain would not suffer the total dumbing of the population.

Regardless of whether you are rich or poor...... you may want to watch intelligent broadcasts.

It may even be the case that the commercial channels would happily prefer the garbage, and even accept advertising on the BBC, as being specific to intelligent programming.

In this way, we could gain a subsidised advertising model, as a necessary national service.

Like a rail infrastructure is subsidised (while it generates it's own income).

Then just let it go out to the world, as Britain's contribution to culture.

Everybody gets it for free anyway (Filmon and geo blockers).

The value/returns would be significant, if historical evidence of the impact of BBC World Service, is anything to go by.

Re: Need an opt out

I watch part of the BBC and occaisionally another part the the BBC. The pay nothing option is easy, don't watch any BBC content. My sky subscription is only reasonable because I don't watch any sky output.

Re: Need an opt out

> I want the option to not pay anything, and throw the TV in the bin.

You already have that option.

Re: Need an opt out

Well, I don't watch Dr Who so if you want to watch it, will you pay my share of my subscription that goes to that programme? And somebody else can pay the share that goes to football...

Re: Flawed comparison

I'm fine with the licence as it stands, and I can even understand closing up the old on-demand-is-exempt-for-some-reason loophole, but anybody who tries to tell me that a tax on PCs or smartphones can sod off.

The TV licence funds essential services which enable us, the viewing public, to receive content - and that's fine, we're funding the content we consume (and the upkeep of the transmission network?) - it makes sense. But if I've paid my internet bill, and my phone bill, and bought my PC and smartphone, and consume (for example) YouTube, Netflix, Amazon and Twitch content... well, what would I be paying a licence for? At no point does that money contribute to the content I'm viewing or the infrastructure over which it travels, that's what I pay my ISP/mobile phone carrier/content providers for. Even if you consider content created by the BBC, not only has that already been paid for by the TV licence, the rights fees are being paid by Netflix/Amazon/etc for streaming online, which are in turn being paid for by me, the consumer. This argument also applies to the BBC Store, whenever that goes public sometime later this year. I see no justification for arbitrarily deciding that just because I own a thing with a screen and speaker I must be doing something which requires a TV licence. Put a TV licence check on iPlayer if you suspect I'm a freeloading licence-dodger, that'll be fair enough by me.

Re: Flawed comparison

"Want cheaper, universally accessible TV? Require more sports to be free to watch."

Or drop sports from the Beeb's mandate altogether.

Assuming the BBC wins the rights to a hundred or so 90-minute games of football every year, that means it's spending half it's annual budget on just 6 and a quarter day's worth of TV time, which a considerable portion of the audience couldn't give a toss about or even actively dislikes. I'd rather see that money being put into documentaries and good script writing than being used to pad Wayne Rooney's salary and 3000 hours of Strictly Come Dancing being used to pad the shortfall.

Re: Flawed comparison

Never mind the fancy stuff.. I'm amazed that when it comes to the local news on the BBC HD channel you get an interlude... why can't they pipe the SD channel down the HD channel ?

Re: I love the BBC but....

I no longer turn to the BBC for news, finding Channel 4 to be much better these days (still watch the occasional Newsnight though)

Re: Subscription version of iPlayer for non-UK customers

There's a new BBC Store to soon be launched (unsure exactly when) which I presume will act as a replacement for the previous BBC iPlayer Global. No sign of what might be available on it yet, or what the cost of content might be, but I'm looking forward to it. Might be worth using if they can shovel up some nice archive content.

Re: Subscription version of iPlayer for non-UK customers

"what am I missing?"

The fact that the Beeb is run by numpties?

Re: Subscription version of iPlayer for non-UK customers

"Offering BBC content to a global paying audience over the internet seems like an obvious way to make extra income, and solves the 'conditional access' problem - what am I missing?"

Do they have the rights to everything worldwide? Answer, no. In the UK the government compels for example music copyright owners to give their permission for the BBC to use any music it wants. They do not have such rights abroad.

Re: Subscription version of iPlayer for non-UK customers

Sadly, as of this month, this app is no longer supported, and the BBC has stopped taking my money.

They were probably concerned that TPTB might notice they had other income streams. Not to mention technology that might be relevant to the license review itself.

Being on every possible delivery platform - Sky, Freesat, cable & internet has a distinct stink of ensuring everyone requires a licence. A notional tax based on a service you could not receive wouldn't survive the first trip to court, whatever the law says. That means withdrawing that 'free' availability simply isn't an option for the BCC, unless they simultaneously switch to conditional access.

I think they have a damn good idea how few Sky customers would volunteer to pay for the BBC channels.

It was entirely deliberate.

One of the reasons for the rush to get Freeview out of the door after the debacle that was ITV Digital was explicitly to get STBs free of Conditional Access deployed as widely as possible. It was a deliberate attempt to forestall any attempt to replace the licence fee with a subscription model.

You have to hand it to the BBC - they had a great deal of foresight.

And, of course, same with Freesat. But that was also leverage to reduce the huge fees Sky were charging the BBC for the privilege of encrypting their content so only UK citizens could view it.

And any comparison other European Digital Terrestrial systems (with minor exceptions) misses the point - terrestrial is an also-ran compared with cable or satellite in most of them.

Re: "But if viewers wanted extras, they’d need to pay. "

You sir are an idiot.

"My telly died last year but I still pay for the license... because it isn't so great an amount to pay for what we currently get."

You have no TV so you get nothing. You are happy to pay a fee for nothing!?!?

While you're here I have this cubic foot of air I'd like to sell you...

Re: bollocks

I think they see it in terms of the middle classes listening to Radio 2, 3, 4 during the day, and in the evening watching the News, Only Connect, Springwatch etc while the low incomes only go to BBC1 to watch Eastenders before changing over to watch Emmerdale, New Faces/Opportunity Knocks Britains Got Talent etc on the other side.

Re: bollocks

"Just a reminder, a middle class is someone who can afford monthly subscription to Sky or Virgin Media, and thus is not limited by free terrestial TV."

Your wrong there, I think you will find they actually cable up poorer/lower classed areas first, because the poor are more likely to sit watching Virgin Media/Sky TV...

Well in France the Canal+ encryption scheme used to be easy to get at, but they've cleaned that issue and now, if you don't pay, you don't get Canal+.

I do now know of any hackers that manage to bypass that. Not saying there aren't any, but what little there are are not hurting Canal+ revenue any more for sure.

Re: I assumed it's been widely hacked "since 1997"

Common Interface is just that - an interface between a conditional access device and the TV set. All the security stuff is in the module, with none in the TV. It was designed that way deliberately (I was one of the designers) so that conditional access provision could be independent from TV/Set-top box manufacture. Sky, in their infinite business wisdom, decided to do it their way rather than joining the party. Lots of arguments at meetings in Geneva as I recall!

There is an upgraded specification, CI Plus, which adds encryption between module & TV using a standardised system to placate some of the content owners. That is independent of the over-air crypto & customer management provided by the module.

Freeview offers OTA firmware updates but none of the El Cheapo MPEG-2 boxes are be able to upgrade their firmware anyway, or the hardware isn't good enough to cope with H264.

Then there are the legal gubbins of adding a new codec to a device which didn't originally have the licence for it and there's no way of charging the end user extra or even working out how many end users have updated.

Maybe a HVAC tuner could be used via the CI?

DTV was all about the cost.

It all comes down to money. During the switch to Digital Terrestrial, TV consumers were being effectively told that they had to spend money in order to continue watching TV. This was never popular, but it was convenient that it coincided with adoption of flat-panel TVs that softened the blow by giving consumers larger screens and space in their homes back as part of the 'deal'.

It would have been possible to publish requirements that mandated more functional and thus more expensive devices, but if the minimum cost STB device was £70-100 rather than the £20-30 (or even cheaper for the supermarket specials) that it was, imagine what the backlash would have been.

I remember at the time I ended up buying freeview STBs for 8 TVs in the house (it's a big house with TVs in most of the bedrooms) and ended up paying a couple of hundred quid for the privilege. I would not have been happy if it had cost me £500 instead, just for the privilege of being able to use the TVs I already owned.

Of course, I don't think that any of the first set of adapters I bought are still functional (catastrophic capacitor breakdown took most of them out - with the exception of the very oldest - about 12 years old, which was still working a few months ago)

These old adapters have mainly now been replaced, along with the TVs they used to drive with TVs that receive freeview anyway. If I had to go through the whole exercise for 7 TVs (one bedroom is no longer being used as a bedroom), I would be pretty unhappy.

I'm getting pretty fed up of everybody, from the technology companies through government and down to people I know who seem to assume that everybody will be replacing tech on a 3 year cycle. It just does not fit in to many, many peoples lifestyles to replace all their tech over such a short time span! As a result, road-maps for at least the next 10 years are required to allow the public to decide whether to spend little and often or a lot, but less frequently.

Re: Interesting view on history

>"The UK market has lagged behind other countries..."

It rather assumes that there is a "front." Do we actually want 4k? That seems like way too much data to use on most PC networks, never mind a tablet with 3G.

Do we want to bulk up video transmissions to the point where they don't fit that well on networks and devices? Yay! We've adopted a standard that ruins our networks for the same content that we had before! We must be at the forefront of IT!

Personally I'm reasonably happy with mpeg2. Its a little irritating that tablets don't support it, but that's the tablets' fault, not broadcast TV. I'd like a higher framerate for watching tennis, not a larger screen.

Re: Interesting view on history

^ This. And to add, with something as universal as the (several) TVs in everyone's house, you can't keep changing the standard every 10 years or so and expect everyone to buy a whole new pile of kit. A line has been drawn and we need to stick with it for a time.

IMHO the line in the UK is not too bad, the problem is the commercialing* of it where the commerical entities are hell bent on (or have to, depending on your view) stuffing the muxes with as much as they can get away with fitting in.

*or re-commericalising, after our hated BBC essentially rescued it out of the catastrophe of ONdigital. TBH for all the thanks they got, I would have just let it die!

Also, we're not using DVB-T2 for standard def contrary to what the article currently says.

Re: But... how do you control the cards

Because in the almost 25 year history of Sky they haven't solved all those problems already. Oh no.

BT Sport in on a commercial mux (COM6 ATM), as are the subscription streaming channels in the mid 200's. The old terrestrial channels fill PS1,PS2&PS3.

The BBC did encrypt the HD programme guide to force manufacturers to agree licences and DRM restrictions. It was broken before they even turned on my channels ;)

No direct taxation, God no. The BBC woud just be another government department subject to all the political meddling that that entails.

Although at the moment the Tory Boy and friends are pushing it to its limits with the review and dropping the Trust.

" funded the damn thing through direct taxation"

Indeed. I have a house in France and portion of the "taxe d’habitation" has a portion marked "la redevance audiovisuelle" (which is a fairly recently devised piece of the tax) which in 2014 was €133. Apparently if you have no device capable of receiving broadcast programmes (which includes Digital TV Recorders and tape TV recorders) you can claim a refund. I did; as I only have a mini-PC into which I drop a mirror image of my home DTR hard drive. It's only been six months and I'm still waiting for the refund.

BTW if I don't watch commercial TV stations; can I claim back the TV advertising portion of every product I buy?

Is that a "No" I hear?

It would seem then, that I am paying for a service I don't use/want. In which case it's a worse tax than VAT. It's such an unfair tax!