BBC Global Warming Scam

[hyperD]

That's a lot of bollox - their pension fund invests into many other companies in FTSE 100, most certainly into banks and going by this one would imagine BBC won't be exposing Norther Rocks near collapse etc.

Of course. But back to the main point with the BBC's "science is settled" viewpoint and refusing to air any other opinion:

... Peter Dunscombe who is the BBC Head of Pension Investment… oh, and Chairman of the very same Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change.

And just for the record, assimilating the voluntary licence fee into income tax would be a bad move. I don't pay the fee because I don't watch live broadcast.

And I agree with you Mr C - the costs in chasing the fee are ridiculous (and aggressive) - make it a voluntary subscription service like many other broadcast facilities. And before anyone says "what about the great programs like The Natural World?" - if the demand is there, then they will still be made by the companies that have been making these progs ever since.

[AtW]

I think BBC should be more commercial - they have very good appeal abroad and should sell their stuff there more, they certainly have good chances to be profitable actually but they should always get some taxpayer support to do programs that would otherwise be unprofitable.

[AtW]

I don't pay the fee because I don't watch live broadcast.

And I don't use NHS and many other services, yet I pay taxes. So what?

The costs of maintaining such a small scale tax collection are too high - it's completely unnecessary.

Frankly same is true for council tax and particularly business rates - I was involved recently with it and response levels from council that we pay tax to were total joke.

[RichardCranium]

programs

BTW, computer programs; TV programmes.


It is too late for the BBC to become profitable. They no longer are a programme-maker in the way they were in the early 1990s; they no longer have the capability. Their business model for some years has been to emulate C4: sponsor film-making but otherwise buy in cheap foreign stuff.

John Birt followed Maggie's orders and stabbed Auntie Beeb in the back with a poisoned stilleto; she will never recover.

[AtW]

It is too late for the BBC to become profitable. They no longer are a programme-maker in the way they were in the early 1990s; they no longer have the capability. Their business model for some years has been to emulate C4: sponsor film-making but otherwise buy in cheap foreign stuff.

Allow TV Ads and they will be profitable. They also have big back catalogue that can and should be aggressively licensed.

Half of their programs should be closed - why should BBC compete for ratings against this Xfactor or whatever it is called bulltulip? BBC should not be chasing ratings - it does so because of the current way it is funded, ie: they have to make something for everyone.

[hyperD]

And I don't use NHS and many other services, yet I pay taxes. So what?

Because you are paying into a national service that is designed to potentially save lives and help those that could not afford to insure themselves personally.

However, having the means to watch Strictly Come Lap Dancing doesn't quite fall into that type of social beneficial category.

[AtW]

However, having the means to watch Strictly Come Lap Dancing doesn't quite fall into that type of social beneficial category.

Vast majority of people have TVs, that's why BBC's license "fee" is a tax in all but name - expensive to collect, and very unfair tax also - ffs, even blind people are supposed to pay TV license fee, I dare you to find any such legislation anywhere around the world!

[HairyArsedBloke]

And I don't use NHS and many other services, yet I pay taxes.

Thanks.

I do use the NHS and many other services, yet I don't pay taxes.

[RichardCranium]

BBC should not be chasing ratings - it does so because of the current way it is funded, ie: they have to make something for everyone.

No.

There are two basic stats: Market Share and Market Reach.

Once upon a time, the BBC used to try to ensure they broadcast enough variety to ensure every single licence payer had one programme every week that they wanted to watch. BBC2 was vital to this by providing weird and wacky programmes for minority audiences. E.g. live chess, programmes about train crashes and so on. That was "market reach": aiming for 100% of the market to watch your channel(s) at some point in the week.

When the Beeb moved away from that model, C4 suddenly appeared and filled the gap.

When Maggie told John Birt (an accountant) to make the Beeb sufficiently profitable to be sold off, BBC Worldwide was created to sell BBC-made programmes round the world. BBC Worldwide was given a shedload of money every year and made no profit; probably because it was full of thousands of pretty airheads and no business people.

To sell your programmes on the global market you have to have a measure of their popularity. To do this, you pitch your programme / series against a very similar one on another channel and then boast about it getting more than 50% of the "market share". So, you schedule Eastenders to clash with Coronation Street, documentaries v documentaries, sci-fi v sci-fi and so on. In this way, you can show your programmes are better and so gain sales worldwide.

Unfortunately, this results in the BBC ploughing larger and larger proportions of its money into fewer and fewer programmes / series. Then it could not afford to produce the low-audience "Market Reach" programmes, so it cut back on them. That results in licence payers saying "But there's nothing on I want; I don't want to pay; abolish the licence fee".

The second effect was to result in ITV losing advertising revenue and so their quality had to fall. Indeed, it has bankrupted some ITV stations. ITV formally asked the government and the BBC to stop the BBC competing directly with it; they were ignored. At this time, most BBC staff agreed with ITV: the Beeb should not have been trying to compete head on.

Then, the Beeb ditched its world-beating specialist areas (engineering, costumes, research, music and dare I say IT) as they were not "core business". They laid off 10,000 people (many not getting redundancy because of the tulipty 2-year rolling contracts they used) and took on 18,000 external people instead to do the work.

To pay for this, it cut right back on its production ability, then sold of its programme-making ability.

BBC should not be chasing ratings - it does so because of the current way it is funded, ie: they have to make something for everyone.

I agree the BBC should not have sought to chase ratings at the expense of market reach. But it does chase ratings because it was instructed to generate revenue through sales, not because of how it is funded.

BTW, prior to John Birt ***king Auntie Beeb up the arse, it was the cheapest national TV producer in the world, and that was including the overhead of national and regional radio.

[hyperD]

Vast majority of people have TVs, that's why BBC's license "fee" is a tax in all but name - expensive to collect, and very unfair tax also - ffs, even blind people are supposed to pay TV license fee, I dare you to find any such legislation anywhere around the world!

I totally agree with you Alex - perhaps we should do what the good people of New Zealand did when they had had enough of being forced to pay for something they considered was just another tax.