Reply to: BBC Global Warming Scam

[Doggy Styles]

I like the way the BBC spreads our message across the globe, its like cultural warfare. It creates an awful lot of Anglophiles and thats a good thing for the country.
It does a similar job that Skippy and prisoner cell block H did for the aussies.

Or the History channel did for the Germans.

[EternalOptimist]

I like the way the BBC spreads our message across the globe, its like cultural warfare. It creates an awful lot of Anglophiles and thats a good thing for the country.
It does a similar job that Skippy and prisoner cell block H did for the aussies.

[DodgyAgent]

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.

Either they are commercial and accountable to the markets or they are state funded. Show me anyone or any body that is "highly respected" and I will show you a paedophile Catholic Priest or a corrupt self serving monopoly (like the UN)

[Churchill]

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

He also worked through his own limited company and income shared with his wife...

Funny that, eh?

[EternalOptimist]

Those days are gone forever.

The "licence to print money" days of commercial broadcasting are a distant memory.

Dont forget Crozier is on the case now.
Pretty soon TV standards will attain the dizzy heights he achieved for the Royal Mail.

[EternalOptimist]

All property is theft.

you nicked that

[AtW]

So what happens when you have a TV but don't plan to be watching it for a bit?

Tax evader!!!



Turn yourself into the nearest police station right now!

[TimberWolf]

So what happens when you have a TV but don't plan to be watching it for a bit? Do you have to have it specially decommissioned or disposed of before you are allowed to stop paying Jonathan Ross' salary?

[VectraMan]

The biggest problem with the BBC is that their total lack of accountability. If they were directly controlled by the state, then there'd be an elected minister responsible and then at least there'd be some degree of indirect public accountability.

As it is the BBC can do whatever the hell it wants, produce nothing but the worst sort of dross, and still force us to pay them.

[RichardCranium]

You free loading Marillion Fan!!!

All property is theft.

[AtW]

(PS I don't have a TV licence...)

You free loading Marillion Fan!!!

Oh btw, what I meant above was that if you had not gotten that job you'd be spending more time on here making rather intelligence arguments and we can't have that!!!

[RichardCranium]

I am very glad that you've now got a job Richard.

Aw, shucks.



(PS I don't have a TV licence...)

[AtW]

I am very glad that you've now got a job Richard.

[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.

[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.