Endless Repeats

We rarely if ever watch live TV, best to record it and then cut out all the dross, which is a lot. If I do get caught watching live the mute button is used when the ads come on.

Tony

Exactly so.

John

How should the BBC be funded interesting survey link

H

Interesting to note that the largest proportion is in favour of the BBC using advertising to raise revenue. This question about BBC funding has been around for many years and I do remember similar discussions at the end of the last century. The major objectors to the BBC using advertising to raise revenue were the ITV companies. There is a finite amount of money available from advertising and if the BBC started using that as a source of revenue then there would be be less all round for all of the broadcasters.

I believe that the funding of the BBC by the licence fee was set up to provide a source of revenue that was free from government influence, although several governments have attempted influence by other means.

Jim.

Edited By Jim Guthrie on 28/12/2021 09:19:40

In truth the BBC IS a commercial broadcaster operating under the guise of being the impartial national broadcasting service!

In 2006 the license fee, as it use to be called, was changed to a tax on receiving live broadcast TV in the UK. The BBC now makes millions selling programmes, something the original set up did not do, it was simply a service. It now pays certain individuals enormous salaries with the excuse that if you want the best, you have to pay for them. Who says they are the best anyway. Interestingly the government has conveniently now stepped back from overseeing its activities!

IMO the BBC should own up to being commercial; abolish the tax and compete with the rest of them. It lost sight of its original objectives many years ago!

Accusations of BBC bias remind me of the Devil's Dictionary definition of Impiety: 'Your irreverence to my deity.'

Dave

BBC not advertising? Regularly watch their flagship evening magazine program 'The one show', every time a 'guest' appears the wife and I look at each other and simultaneously say " Written a book " , which surprise, surprise they then spend 5 minutes spouting on about.

What seems nonsensical to me is that assuming I only want to watch one channel, say ITV, I then have to pay the BBC in order to do it? Why? What would you say if, in order to use a Nissan motorcar, you then had to pay a fee to Ford? Or perhaps to use a Dyson vacuum cleaner you had to pay Hoover for the privelege? Silly, I know, but that's what is happening, and I object strongly to it.

Why can't the licence fee be renamed as something like a "transmission" fee, and the proceeds be used to pay solely for the costs of operating the transmitters and associated equipment? The BBC can then, or perhaps should be, left to survive on whatever money it can scrounge elsewhere, be it adverts, subscriptions, whatever. When all said and done, this idea of separating content from the transmission medium has already been done with, eg BT, whereby Openreach now provides the transmission medium (the so-called last mile, or copper) whilst other companies, Talk-Talk, or even BT itself, provide the interconnection means, ie the exchanges

Another problem that I foresee concerns the use of DVR's to skip over the adverts. Way back when VCR's ruled the roost, there were shouts of dismay from content producers about people recording their programmes and skipping over the ads with the ultimate result that CD/DVD players now relinquish control of the skip-over function to the content providers. Just try buying a commercial CD/DVD and then skipping over the illegal copying warning - you cannot unless you modify the player to stop that function. So, how long will it be before DVR's incorporate the ability for content producers to prevent ad skipping?

On a similar vein, I have tried using at least one of the catch-up services, Ch.5 I think it may have been, and guess what - I could not fast forward over the ads! I no longer bother with catch-up, but in fairness, it's also the complete rigmarole of logging on, providing a post code, and giving my maiden grandmother's inside leg measurement that is the real turn off. Really, I've better things to do than go through all the above.

Sorry folks, rant over.

Peter G. Shaw

Given that the license fee is basically a screen TAX and that the British B******t company have self determination where the "Fees" are spent, bit like the PPC investigating the Police, I wonder how long it will be before they decide that it will be a SCREEN tax with regards to Laptops etc.? It used to be that you didn't need a license to watch non live transmissions but the new "Authorities" have closed that loophole, so given that with streaming facilities, computers are "CAPABLE" of displaying live TV when is that bombshell going to hit?

No doubt some Jackal in the archives is working on that one. Still we should smile sweetly when £5,000,000 is being paid to one presenter.

My lathe/miller is CAPABLE of manufacturing armaments, BUT I don't do it.

Regards Ian.

Nearly forgot, it is possible to watch commercial TV recordings without the  ads BUT, there's a fee involved.

Edited By Circlip on 28/12/2021 11:20:02

Edited By Circlip on 28/12/2021 11:20:36

Out of interest, the BBC does not operate or maintain the TV transmitters etc Company called Arqiva does but that was looking to be sold earlier this year.

The BBC, under the guise of TV Licensing, are guilty of harassment and demanding money with menaces. And I’m not joking either. If an insurance company, for example, sent out letters telling people who are not their customers that they risk fines if they drive without insurance cover, or telling those same people that they are ‘under investigation’ there would rightly be uproar. At the very least the ASA would be having strong words with them. But the BBC do this routinely. I have a stack of threatening letters from them. Some of them even resort to ambiguous or misleading statements which imply that owning a tv or an aerial necessitates a licence, which of course it does not.

Attempting to tell them that you do not want their services means divulging your personal details to them, which I am loathe to do. So I have to put up with a letter every 2-4 weeks, and threats of a visit, not from a salesman but from an ‘enforcement officer’. If one ever appears on my doorstep I may not be responsible for the resulting language.

Of course it's not the BBC that collects, it is Capita under the guise of TV Licencing Agency.

Capita is one of those "Service" companies that get involved in as many money making pies as they can.

Capita? surely there's an R missing somewhere?

Our government seems to have a compulsion to get C*****a to undertake things that should be done by the public service, make a hash of it then get paid even more to screw something else up.

Deciding who qualifies for benefits, army recruitment, electronic tagging, need I go on? Trouble is the worse they get the more work seems to go their way.

Obviously the salesman are a bit brighter than the procurement dept.If it was their own money they would be a bit more careful!!

Tony

Edited By Tony Pratt 1 on 28/12/2021 19:51:20

As I don't get a newspaper I find these come in handy, and I get them in pairs owing to some house naming mix up. Delivered free too.

For lighting the woodburner of course, what were you thinking.

My 2p:

Anyone who has watched television in the USA will know what total rubbish television can become when it is all funded purely by advertising. So many adverts that a 1 hour program has only about 10 mins of actual content, and 50 mins of adverts, trailers, recaps on the program etc. It is banal and unwatchable.

The BBC is far from perfect right now, and needs a really good shake up. In our household we pay our licence fee and watch only Freeview, and most of the good drama is on ITV: Foyles War, Vera, Endeavour, Morse, Poirot, Marple, etc. (and has almost no swearing, sex or violence).

The BBC receives the licence fee, the commercial channels receive the advertising revenue. If the licence fee was abolished and the BBC had to take advertising, all the channels would suffer because the advertisers would want to be on the Beeb, so the advertising revenue would be reduced for everyone.

The BBC sets a technical and content standard, which the advertising funded stations match (or exceed). If the BBC disappeared, the other stations would not necessarily need to keep that standard up, witness television in the USA.

The BBC lost out when sport decided it could make millions out of television rights and subscription television. The BBC cannot compete with subscription services such as Sky and BT. Now if you want a lot of sport you have to pay an expensive subscription, so everybody has lost out, except the SKY, BT and sport club executives.

Many say the licence fee is a tax. It could be taken out of our income tax, but you could argue that the BBC are being honest and open by declaring it. People moan about £150 a year but spend much more than that on mobile phones, satellite subscriptions, car loans, gym membership etc etc. Having said that, most presenter salaries are frankly ludicrous and offensive. Engineering staff at the BBC used to earn about half what you could earn by going to ITV, but only the BBC trained the engineers.

The BBC has a World wide network of journalists, stringers and other news gathering facilities. The BBC and its authority is/was one thing that makes our country different to others. Most other countries know who the BBC are. Like the monarchy - very far from perfect in recent years, but it helps make our country what it is.

As SoD says, be careful what you wish for. The BBC used to be great - think about our childhoods. I personally would rather we kept the BBC and fixed it, rather than getting rid of it.

The licence fee has just been frozen for the next two years, and the Government has said the next licence fee review will be its last.

Edited By John Doe 2 on 18/01/2022 10:29:58

Edited By John Doe 2 on 18/01/2022 10:33:04

The BBC

.......

Apart from that the BBC is fine

Edited By Ady1 on 18/01/2022 11:07:39

I do agree with the terrible state of TV in some other countries where advertising is intrusive to the program, often to the point where ads take up more of the screen than the subject matter. However, the BBC has also changed.

Recollection through youth and rose-tinted memory is such that one had belief in the integrity and truthfulness of BBC news and opinion and program content in well articulated 'Queen's English' and a moral message.

Those days have gone with competition and inclusiveness and every subset of nation and ethnicity wanting their own views and voice, giving the BBC an impossible task to fulfil. That, and claims of journalistic independence and a company that follows its own agenda lead to claims (rightly or wrongly) of bias. And certainly to poorer journalistic standards, with rarely a day free of grammatical errors on the BBC news website

The BBC has lost its place as the vice of honest government and the country has lost any suggestion of the latter such that i contend that it no longer justifies the right to charge in the way that it does.

If we are in the era of 'choice' then I have chosen not to have a TV licence, not to have subscriptions to sky and the like and find my entertainment elsewhere.

pgk

Note the embarrassment of criticising BBC grammar and seeding my own post with typos...which i hope I just corrected

Edited By pgk pgk on 18/01/2022 11:03:16

Queens English disappeared when Lady Isobel Barnett and Silvia Peters etc. were retired. One the Beeb haven't repeated is "The Potters Wheel", essential viewing back in the day. Agree about the 10pm repeats on ITV3 though.

Regards Ian.