Goodbye BBC Red Button!
BBC Red Button to be cut off Photograph: unknown
Too many people have been Cord Cutting...
Details have emerged today[1] of the current cuts to BBC services that will be made to save £150m from the BBC's budget – you might have had a go yourself https://ukfree.tv/bbccuts at predicting the nature of the cuts.
From the £201.0m annual cost of BBC Online, iPlayer and Red Button budget, the £16m spent of Red Button will stop and £12m will be cut from BBC online.
Another £35m will cut Sports rights, £12m from the TV services, £5m from BBC News.
£50m more will be about 1,000 job cuts and £20m from long-term contracts.
This still leaves another £513m or so to be cut each year by 2020 to deal with the BBC taking on the social sending of free TV licences for the over-75s, something the governing parties manifesto promised to provide.
Will you miss the Red Button or is a relic from the pre-internet era?
[1] BBC unveils £50m cut to sport and TV under savings plan
Saturday, 28 November 2015
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Peter11:40 PM
Peter Newlands, I'm still getting the BBC text service via my Humax +Box. I don't think it was available on the BBC HD channels a few years ago, but I've discovered that it is now.As for the licence fee, it is a licence to watch TV, so even if you never watch a single BBC programme, you still have to pay, which is what so many of us find unreasonable. If I do all my shopping at Sainsbury's and only walk past a Tesco store on my way there, would it be reasonable for the government to insist that I also I pay Tesco because it is available to me? The senior managers at the BBC claim their salaries are 'only' what they'd be paid at other companies although the BBC doesn't need to worry about ratings in any real free-market sense.
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Peter11:49 PM
Questions:Why is there an American flag at the end of my post, (I'm in London, using a Yorkshire ISP)?Why is my previous post in one paragraph despite having started a new paragraph after "... discovered that it is now."?Is there some trickery I need to engage in for it to display as intended?
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Thursday, 3 December 2015
Who on earth do the BBC not make BBC online into a commercial venture in the UK? Discreet advertising would turn it from a cost into a profit generator. Before anyone else says it - yes I know it already has advertising outside the UK.
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MikeB6:23 PM
Martin Bains: Firstly, because the BBC does not take advertising, at least within the UK.
Next, because if it ever did, very commercial channel would scream. In fact commercial channels and other media complain now (we mean you, ITV, and local papers), although such complaints are pretty spurious. Imagine your a newspaper trying to attract online advertising to offset falling print readership - would you want the BBC advertising online?
And finally, because we've already paid for it. Thats what the licence fee is for. Why would I want to pay twice?
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Thursday, 10 December 2015
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Anthony9:32 PM
By bringing ALL I player content under the licence fee, this would also mean that if all you do is access BBC radio content YOU would also have to pay a licence fee too which to me is unfair indeed. It reminds me of the old scheme where you had to have a BBC Radio licence, which was scrapped years ago. This is basically expanding it into a catch-all system where radio would fall back under a licence scheme that was scrapped years ago. Seems very backwards thinking to me.
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MikeB10:30 PM
Anthony: The reason why the radio licence was scrapped was because by 1971, the bulk of people had TV's, and the cost of the radio only fee was a whole 1.25. It really wasn't worth collecting it. Currently, 96% of the UK population have a TV, and therefore should be paying a TV licence.That covers TV, radio and online. I'm sure that there are people who only have a radio, and therefore pay nothing, but since its pretty much impossible to prevent people from accessing FM radio, its not worth worrying about. However, you can stop people accessing the BBC online services who have not paid for it. Thats fair.
If your accessing Iplayer, be it for TV or radio, your still acessing BBC material, which needs to be paid for. You dont get something for nothing, or at least your shouldn't if the rest of us are paying for it.
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Friday, 11 December 2015
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Anthony6:43 AM
MikeB what about people with DAB radio sets? They can still access BBC Radio without a licence, plus don't forget, there WILL eventually come a time when all BBC and commercial radio will leave MW and FM wavebands for good once the 100% DAB covered right across the whole of the United Kingdom. In that instance would licenceless DAB radio owners be needlessly chased and hounded for TVL payments even though they haven't got a TVL? Only way you can make BBC Radio available to licence free payers on the DAB radio platform is to introduce sets with a Conditional Access Module card reader unit built-in and use of an encryption system-a remember a system years ago for such digital pay-radio that was devised by the deceased Radio Nova genius Chris Cary that was based on such a scheme called Radio Exidy which never took off.
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Jon Freeman12:16 PM
Anthony, unless things have changed over the past 15 years, I think they will hound anyone who doesn't have a licence regardless of whether or not they had a radio. I went "tvless" a few years back when I moved into a flat and was on my own with little income. They sent threatening looking letters. After a few, I phoned them and asked if someone could call round and inspect my flat. The reply to that was "That would defeat the object". I then asked about how to stop to letters and got "You don't have to open them". and so on... Their position at least was that anyone who claims to be without a tv must be a liar.
Just to continue briefly with this off topic bit. I didn't find life without tv that bad and given that the bits I missed most, eg. some live test cricket has since gone pay to view (something I will not go for), I'd probably find cutting out tv completely even easier now if I decided again to take that decision.
OK, so I can and have opted out in the past and would like people to be able to do so honestly without being considered criminal but I think the question "Am I in favour of the licence for those who watch tv?" is rather different. Now the BBC has an awful lot of output (let's start with Strictly....) that is of zero interest to me and I may in my own tv watching hours spend more time eg. watching re runs of detective things on ITV3, etc.
But I don't consider the licence fee unreasonable and I suppose I am of the school of thought that still views the BBC as some sort of maintainer of standards???
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MikeB7:40 PM
Anthony: I think you've created a problem, where none actually exists. There will be no hounding of anyone, any more than there has been over the past 45 years. As I pointed out, the reason a seperate radio licence was stopped was because the majority of people had TV's, and it wasn't cost effective to track people down for this extra licence.
Be it DAB, FM, LW, a crystal set or even the fillings in someones teeth, the TV Licence covers the lot, and since 96% of the population has a TV, that leaves just 4% to police. And when the loophole about watching/listening online is closed, I suspect that the number of people watching online without paying up will also fall.
The number of people who just use a radio and nothing else is relatively small, and I suspect is getting smaller by the day. Much as I'd like people listening to BBC radio to stump up (and if your the sort of person with just a radio, I suspect your more likely to listen to Radio 2 than some urban/street music station), but its not exactly practical.You could go around and find out if people are listening to their radio, but its not difficult to hide a radio, and its hardly worth it. And I'm sure that the radio manufacturers and government would love to introduce a CAM system for kitchen radios, when they haven't got one for TV's and PVR's yet.
The radio licence finished up at the equivalent of about 20 in 1971, and the figures I've seen from the BBC reckon that the cost of radio per month per licence fee is about 2.61 - so call it 32 for the year. Is that possible to collect? Unlikely. In other words, enforcing a radio licence would be economically inefficent, and practically impossible.
Jon Freeman: By the sound of it, I dont think you were exactly being 'hounded'. Once you'd opened a letter and rung them, they should have just sent you a form to fill in (they shouldn't have told you to ignore offical letters - thats a very bad idea). The reason they assume peple have a TV when they say they have not is simply because the majority of people are lying. Its like HMRC taking at face value people saying they have no earnings and therefore dont need to pay tax - it might be true for some, but mostly its not.
Although you might spend much of your time watching ITV3, statistically, 93% of licence fee payers use BBC1 at least once a week, and its likely there will be other programming both on TV and radio that you probably do use. I agree that the BBC does do quality programming, and the cost is very reasonable when you look at what we get. Its a shame that people do 'dodge the column', because it makes life harder for everyone else.
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Saturday, 12 December 2015
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Jon Freeman1:20 PM
Just to clarify something MikeB. I do use BBC (most regularly Pointless followed by the 6 O'Clock News at tea time) and BBC is more widely used within the household both with tv - and radio - Radio Norfolk is used regularly for the Norwich City games by one member who is also a fan of The Archers on Radio 4... Even if our personal usage involved no BBC, I think I would be in favour of the licence - although, in that situation, I probably would be questioning why we could find nothing of any interest to any of us....
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