So the BBC is... weird. The majority of the operation is a taxpayer-funded public broadcaster with a remit to produce high quality programming for free; but there's a unit called BBC Worldwide whose job it is to battle it out in the red-in-tooth-and-claw world of commercial TV programming, selling BBC programmes overseas and minting money that can then be used to subsidize the public broadcasting component.
While this sounds laudable as an idea, for this to work it also means that the British taxpayer is not allowed to subsidize BBC Worldwide in any way. For example, BBCW pays rent at market rates for its office space to the rest of the BBC, even though they're in the same building, and they're virtually prohibited from selling anything in the UK. Add in the fact that the rest of the British media business is (understandably) quite pissed off about having a competitor that operates under a different set of rules, meaning they watch it like a hawk and squawk as soon as there's even a hint of unfair advantage, and you get all sorts of bizarro-world conflicts and overblown solutions like this that throw the baby out with the bathwater.
(Disclaimer: I used to work for a company owned by BBC Worldwide. This is my personal opinion.)
But if BBCW is emphatically not subsidized as stated above, wouldn't it be perfectly OK -- even more OK than regular BBC -- if it competed with UK commercial websites? Since it's not got any "unfair" subsidy advantage?
Not trying to argue, just trying to understand the (bizarre) logic of the blockade.
Please send an email to the BBC Trust asking them to reassess wether this policy really is in the best interests of the BBC and the licence payer.
Please abstain from just complaining. The BBC is a complex beast and I genuinely believe this policy was drafted with the BBC and the licence payers best interests at heart, but perhaps they should take another look at this policy and debate wether or not there is a better way to comply with the BBC charter whilst not limiting access to content for license fee payers.
trust.enquiries@bbc.co.uk
You may also contact Maria Miller, who is the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport to perhaps urge the BBC Trust to look into this issue.
The anger by the OP and most of the commenters is misplaced. This is not a decision solely by the BBC Trust, and was not done with the licence players best interest at heart. This is the result of lobbying by newspapers and commercial broadcasters. The theory is that compulsory tax (or license fee) payers money should not be used to compete against commercial interests in anything other than TV broadcasting. In the current political climate, this is unlikely to change.
In fact, there was a concerted effort a few years back to shut down the entire BBC News website.
Yes sky etal including the Guardian actively lobby against the BBC as they can't compete against good services if you have heard UK commercial radio vs the BBC you will understand why.
No one ask why the sky tax is higher than the license fee and sky produces virtually zero high quality programming as that woudl upset that nice Mr Murdoch and we cant have that now can we.
Radio 2 was deliberately hobbled as it was getting to successful.
The BBC has been out of control for a while now. They bought Lonely Planet and sold it at an £80m loss, they claim to provide impartial news coverage but clearly don't, and they have presided over a paedophile scandal that would make the Catholic Church blush.
The BBC runs the worlds largest news broadcasting organisation. It has 3,500 staff, has 44 foreign news bureaux, has correspondents in almost every country, produces 120hrs of radio and television output each day, is the largest news room in europe and runs on £350 million a year.
The BBC Natural history Unit produces 100 hours of television and 50 hours of radio every year, and is the largest wildlife production house in the world. It's work is watched by audiences around the globe and has won Emmys, BAFTAs and Prix Italias.
It's sports coverage (when it can get the rights) is second to none. The most long lasting and iconic comedies and dramas in British culture were created by and housed at the BBC.
The BBC runs for £4.8 Billion a year. Compare that with sky that runs at £5.9 Billion a year. Everything on the BBC is free to licence payers. To get the complete sky Package would cost you £66 per month AND you have to watch adverts AND they still have Pay Per View for anything worth watching. Neither ITV, Chanel 4 or 5 offer anything near the quality and quantity that the BBC offer (Although Chanel 4 news is my second choice). And every other digital channel is basically endless reruns of BBC programming (Switch on Dave, $5 says it's a Top Gear rerun).
I'll forgive them a few hiccups, and I expect a few hiccups considering it's size and reach. Overall, I think they're doing a sterling job.
In your comment about the child abuse scandal, you were replying directly to a comment about attempts to shut down the BBC News website; in that context, your comments are going to be interpreted as being about the whole organization, not just about a single issue. In that context, it's not justified to then dismiss counterarguments (for the continued running of the BBC) as unrelated.
I would have thought that policies and procedures for producing good programming content are unrelated to whether it is OK to cover up child abuse or not. You could run a perfect news organisation, for instance, but still have a bad record on child protection. The two are unrelated.
The BBC are prohibited from running certain commercial services (of which BBC.com is one) in the UK due to regulatory requirements.
It's not their decision.
You could of-course lobby your MP to get it changed, but I imagine there would be substantial opposition from both supporters and opponents of public media services to allowing BBC to run commercial services in the UK.
This applies also to BBC Travel, which is run in partnership with Lonely Planet, last I checked. I used to really enjoy those articles, now I never read them because I can't be faffed to proxy up every time...
If anybody is still wondering why BBC Worldwide would block its contents from viewers in the UK, it seems reactions like these are what they're trying to prevent.
Yes, they block the websites from the UK because people being outraged at a ("commercial" arm of a) state broadcaster losing £80m is a complete overreaction.
Whiskers - it seems I can't reply to you, but according to the top-rated comment on this page:
The majority of the operation is a taxpayer-funded public broadcaster with a remit to produce high quality programming for free; but there's a unit called BBC Worldwide whose job it is to battle it out in the red-in-tooth-and-claw world of commercial TV programming, selling BBC programmes overseas and minting money that can then be used to subsidize the public broadcasting component.
That would imply that BBC Worldwide profits do impact the license fee (assuming the BBC don't just spend the profits, but use it to drive down license fee costs).
The thing is they're still running the services whether someone in the UK consumes it or not.
I thought the primary reason for it not running commercial services was so that its integrity as an independent source of news and culture wasn't compromised. So surely by running anything commercial, it is potentially compromised.
You can already see that by the type of programmes that get made these days. It's clear much of it is made to sell to the rest of the world, rather than just for a UK audience.
So showing ads is the problem right? Then don't show adds to UK citizens and let them read the damn thing instead of blocking the article? Then BBC International can charge BBC for showing "add free content" to UK citizens and that would take care of the formalities.
They are not allowed to do that, either, due to lobbying from the private media companies. The companies managed to push through a rule that the BBC cannot show any content in the UK whose production was funded commercially, even if they showed the result ad-free in the UK.
Showing ads is not really the problem. Using public money to compete with industries (i.e. Rupert Murdoch) who can place very high lobbying pressure on them not to do that is the problem.
I think it's really important to have some context for this. It's not just a matter of "we can't show ads" - more that the BBC cannot enter certain markets in the UK that fall outside their remit.
A number of years ago, the BBC ran a lot of websites that were extremely useful but not directly related to their broadcast output.
Unfortunately (for the general public), commercial broadcasters and publishers made persistant and vocal complaints that they were being irreparably harmed by the BBC entering into markets that were well outside their broadcasting remit. This led to a number of those sites getting shut down, and the BBC's web remit being considerably tightened inside the UK.
BBC Worldwide operates to a certain degree 'at arms length' from the publicly funded BBC, and is able to enter markets that are outside the BBC's normal remit. However, it is severely restrained on entering those markets in the UK, due to the perceived advantage the company has over other commercial competitors.
So is there a way to make bbc.com articles available to us in a way that doesn't involve unfair promotion?
The problem is that I can't read an article that somebody else referred me to. He's already promoting it. I don't think it'd be unfair to give me access on that basis.
Browsing bbc.com through the front page? I'm not interested in that anyway.
LWN.net do "subscriber links", where a subscriber can share a subscriber-only article. What if bbc.com did that, so that readers can share an article with everyone?
This is subject to abuse, of course. LWN.net control it (presumably) by controlling subscriptions, since only subscribers can generate subscriber links and the links are unique and trackable. But I can think of some mitigation strategies for this, and am not sure that abuse will be such a big deal.
I don't know if any of the brits here have ever browsed the BBC from abroad - when I was at COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009 (being at a political gathering, I was on free wifi and news sites half the time) I was shocked to see the BBC news site with adverts on it!
I was laughed at by the Danes, Swedes and Canadians I was with, because obviously the BBC always had adverts on.
Seriously, if the law says the BBC can't show adverts in the UK, they should make ad-free versions of the sites available, not an error message.
In fact, the issue here doesn't even seem to be adverts - it's that its a bbc.com article instead of a bbc.co.uk one - i.e a commercial service that isn't allowed to receive "promotion" here. As long as they don't link to it from the UK sites, I don't see how they are "promoting" it; we all found that link from a 3rd party source (i.e. HN) and wanted to read it! :/
I wanted to read this exact same article yesterday, clicked on the link and got the same "reason" page. I thought about configuring a proxy to try and get it to load, but then thought "fuck it" and just gave up.
It is ridiculous and the lawyers that cause this to happen are so short sighted about how the internet works that its laughable. However as my actions show, it is annoying enough for people to give up and just accept it.
Both are proxies of a sort. They're effectively websites with a wildcard DNS entry and the subdomain is then used to determine the remote site. In nyud.net's case, this is located in their CDN before the real site is contacted. In the case of sixxs.org, the site is contacted directly. The difference is in the DNS entries. .ipv4.sixxs.org returns an IPv4 address and .sixxs.org returns an IPv6 address. Once connected, if the Host: header ends in ipv4.sixxs.org, the proxy connects to the remote site over IPv6; if not, the proxy connects over IPv4. The end result is that you get a proxy that lets you access the IPv6 web without IPv6 (and the IPv4 web without IPv4).
This falls under exactly the same Laws that prevent a UK resident viewing Channel 4 content on YouTube. (Or, try asking a German why so much of YouTube is "dark" to them, specifically Corporately sponsored music channels).
It has nothing to do with your license fee, and everything to do with the (vastly complex and totally out of my expertise) realms of International Copyright / Licensing Laws.
As ever, these things are really not simple enough to be covered by a blog post. Yes: the BBC's default page should be totally transparent (i.e. "You cannot view this because of agreement X, Y, Z", however, there's probably a clause in some contract preventing them from stating it - and no, that's not a joke) but this really is not the droid you're looking for to rant at.
Hint: If you're in Australia, the entire works of George Orwell are public domain; in the USA and the EU, this isn't the case. And yes, we need a serious shake up of the entire structure to progress, but this isn't the wet-stone to sharpen your axe on, trust me.
Ask why Disney gets 70+ years of Copyright, it's a far more egregious case.
It is the case that some international BBC content cannot be viewed in the UK because it is not funded by the licence fee, but instead by BBC Worldwide which is a commercial enterprise.
I appreciate that this is frustrating but because BBC Worldwide is run commercially there is no obligation for the BBC to make international service content available in the UK.
Thanks again for bringing your concerns to my attention.
It's a little like the BBC world service news, which is pretty good (especially compared to sky and cnn and so on), except you can't get it in the UK ... it even has the same presenters that are on the normal BBC 24 News, and 10 o'clock news! It's weird to say the least.
But it gets even more weird, as programmes made by the licence pay version of the BBC appear on the world service news. I was watching it a week ago in a hotel room and noticed they were showed Click, a programme made by the BBC in the UK. So what is that doing being shown on the commercial arm of the BBC?
> So what is that doing being shown on the commercial arm of the BBC?
BBC World News is distinct from BBC Worldwide, they're different commercial groups. It has a much closer relationship with BBC News, which is publicly funded. BBC Worldwide exists to make a profit, whereas BBC World News is commercially funded but not profit driven. It's...complicated.
They're simply not allowed to have ads (or direct subscriber fees) in front of the license-paid British public. The same content may be available elsewhere with adverts or fees (and that does provide a substantial chunk of their income), but those extra money-making bits are only allowed offshore. The British public have already paid for what they get, so double-dipping is not allowed. (And unlike some other "public" broadcasters, your programming isn't regularly preempted for fundraising begathons featuring programming that almost none of the regular viewers like.)
This just reads to me as generic nerdrage and/or an attempt to gain some internet points by piggybacking an earlier discussion on HN.
It would be far quicker to view the article via Coral Cache, the Way Back Machine or some other proxy, and it would be far more effective to write to the BBC Trust and/or your local MP.
A Chrome extension that solves this issue: http://goo.gl/VsD5s. Extract the files, head to chrome://extensions > Load unpacked extension and select the folder.
If they called their international subsidiary, "Super Mega Global Worldwide Media Corporation", it wouldn't seem any more or less ridiculous than anyone else doing geo-targeting.
Anyone else doing the same gets the same level of ridicule. It's not even the same as the likes of Netflix where there are all sorts of third party stake holders, licenses, etc. - BBC owns this content. Why would anyone other than BBC not get criticised if they did this?
The BBC used to have a lot of commercial divisions, or wholly-owned subsidiary companies: BBC Resources Ltd, BBC Technology Ltd, BBC Broadcast Ltd, and BBC Worldwide Ltd. Of those, the first three have been sold off, leaving only BBC Worldwide.
THIS!
In the last few years the BBC have produced nothing but period dramas and drivel all of it aimed at the american market. Why make quality british programming for the British market any more when you can make a 'UK series' (6 eps) and make pure profit in the US market.
Any institution that has given us the ending of Blackadder Goes Forth (the best 90 seconds of television ever filmed), Top Gear, Red Dwarf, Blake's 7 and The New Statesman and Sherlock just cannot do much wrong in my opinion.
Sherlock alone is enough to disprove that hyperbolic statement.
They aren't perfect by any means but have managed to produce some gems. They often don't fully appreciate that they are gems when making them mind you.
Just because you aren't a fan of various BBC programmes, doesn't mean that other people aren't either. Many people in the UK really enjoy all the period drama stuff that they show. That the US market also enjoys it is an added bonus.
Please don't project your own opinions onto the rest of the UK.
No but large swaths of the UK probably don't watch BBC1 or BBC2 on a regular basis as they have a sky or cable and I agree with them, they shouldn't need to fund the BBC if they don't use the content.
Reports suggest we'd make 6-7 billion on a sell off. Sell it and put the money towards buying back openreach because an infrastructure is what .gov should do, not content. =p
Yes, non-UK residents should note that if you, in the UK, only ever want to watch Japanese wrestling on a paid TV channel, you still need to shell out on a BBC annual licence (145 pounds/$220) or face a nasty penalty. This generates income for the BBC of > 3bn sterling.
I never said I didn't like it, I said it was drivel. I'm quite partial to the odd well produced period drama.
What I'm trying to say is that recently they tend produce content with a mind to how the US will receive this new content. Dr who, top gear and downton abbey for instance. All of these are popular in the US and while that isn't a bad thing (more money to the BBC to hopefully make more content) what I disagree with is that all they produce is more of the SAME content. They've lost innovation and only make content in a few genres with recurring themes.
>> Please don't project your own opinions onto the rest of the UK.
how is my stating a personal opinion 'projecting my opinion onto the rest of the UK'? Isn't the point of a discussion to discuss your personal opinion or must I refrain from commenting because I happen to think strictly come dancing is a pile of poo and you think claudia 'needs a haircut' winkleman is brilliant? :D
Forgive me reposting (with some ammends) what I posted above, but I think it's relevant...
The BBC runs the worlds largest news broadcasting organisation. It has 3,500 staff, has 44 foreign news bureaux, has correspondents in almost every country, produces 120hrs of radio and television output each day, is the largest news room in europe and runs on £350 million a year.
The BBC Natural history Unit produces 100 hours of television and 50 hours of radio every year, and is the largest wildlife production house in the world. It's work is watched by audiences around the globe and has won Emmys, BAFTAs and Prix Italias.
It's sports coverage (when it can get the rights) is second to none. The most long lasting and iconic comedies and dramas in British culture were created by and housed at the BBC.
The BBC runs for £4.8 Billion a year. Compare that with sky that runs at £5.9 Billion a year. Everything on the BBC is free to licence payers. To get the complete sky Package would cost you £66 per month AND you have to watch adverts AND they still have Pay Per View for anything worth watching AND they produce next to nothing original. The vast majority of it;s content is bought in from the states. Neither ITV, Chanel 4 or 5 offer anything near the quality and quantity that the BBC offer (Although Chanel 4 news is my second choice). And every other digital channel is basically endless reruns of BBC programming (Switch on Dave, $5 says it's a Top Gear rerun).
Literally the only channel I ever watch on television. It's pretty sad that the interesting documentaries have to be relegated to a separate channel so as not to confuse anyone watching BBC 1 or 2 (and BBC 1 and 2 get the HD versions, damn it.)
see me clarifying above :) they produce new content with a mind to the US audience which is my main bugbear with the BBC. They are still producing content.
While this sounds laudable as an idea, for this to work it also means that the British taxpayer is not allowed to subsidize BBC Worldwide in any way. For example, BBCW pays rent at market rates for its office space to the rest of the BBC, even though they're in the same building, and they're virtually prohibited from selling anything in the UK. Add in the fact that the rest of the British media business is (understandably) quite pissed off about having a competitor that operates under a different set of rules, meaning they watch it like a hawk and squawk as soon as there's even a hint of unfair advantage, and you get all sorts of bizarro-world conflicts and overblown solutions like this that throw the baby out with the bathwater.
(Disclaimer: I used to work for a company owned by BBC Worldwide. This is my personal opinion.)