The Great Debate about the BBC and Licence Fee

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  • Some news items from America's Variety mag which clearly show which way the wind is blowing, so to speak:

    Amazon Spent $11 Billion on Prime Video and Music Content in 2020, Up 41%

    Amazon spent a cool $11 billion on TV series, movies and music for its Prime services last year, an increase of 41% from $7.8 billion in 2019, the ecommerce giant disclosed in its annual report Thursday.

    Amazon Prime Tops 200 Million Members, Jeff Bezos Says

    Amazon Prime, the ecommerce giant’s membership program that includes access to Prime Video, now counts more than 200 million subscribers globally, founder Jeff Bezos wrote in his final annual letter to shareholders as CEO.

    Bezos most recently had announced that Amazon Prime had topped 150 million members in January 2020. The company rarely releases such metrics and doesn’t break out the number of Prime members by country or region, nor has it revealed specific numbers about Prime Video viewership. In the U.S., Amazon Prime costs $119 per year or $12.99 per month (plus taxes).

    If anyone had any lingering doubts about whether Amazon was just sticking its toes into the media world, or whether it wanted to take it over, these articles show that Amazon is very serious about its media business and is here to stay. Whether they'll knock Netflix off their perch remains to be seen but at 200 million paying customers, they are a serious force now in the world of "broadcasting".

  • Nice article published yesterday from RXTV about the future of tv and how it will affect broadcasters here:

    https://rxtvinfo.com/2021/how-holly…favourite-shows

    Well worth a read if you're interested in the subject.

    Yes, that's a good summary of what is happening and it's all being revealed before our very eyes.

    A number of posters on a certain other forum I could name will really not want to read this! ;)

  • I know you have persisted and did it in a calm way, which is why I thought you would be a good mod. One against the rest is quite a feat!

    I know how it feels.

    Strange though.......... OB.... a right wing hard liner among other right wing hard liners is lauded as being good material for a mod.

    A moderate / leftist individual making arguments backed up with supporting evidence, against the prevailing extremist state of the country is told that she has a screw loose, shouldn't make any more posts about Brexit (repression of free speech) and has been banned twice for telling the truth on issues.

    Yep........ that's life in Brexit Britain. Oh, sorry.... did I say a banned word*...? Oh well... there's another week in Forum Box Jail. Tsk.


    *OH MY GOD.... I said it twice. Make that two weeks.

  • Strange though.......... OB.... a right wing hard liner among other right wing hard liners is lauded as being good material for a mod.

    Tread carefully, Jenny.

    And as for the rest of your rant, you have never been banned for expressing your political opinion, you have been banned for making personal abusive remarks against others.

    I DO NOT require a reply from you on this.

  • Strange though.......... OB.... a right wing hard liner among other right wing hard liners is lauded as being good material for a mod.

    Just for the record, Jenny, I don’t think most people with an ounce of credibility could in all seriousness label a mature person who has voted both Conservative and Labour over the last 25 years a ‘right wing hard liner’. Accordingly, I will take that as a joke. Not one of your best, I may add. :/

  • If we survive as a species, which I doubt we will, I like to think that TV will not exist in the future and we will have walls built out of microchips, a giant screen with a controller so we have in effect our own personal a star trek style holodeck.

  • I think TV has a great future. I am clear that streaming will dominate before long, but what I am not sure of is whether British streamers will be able to compete with US output.

    I certainly hope so. BBC and ITV between them have improved their original drama content immensely over recent years, and so potentially I see the likes of Britbox and Acorn TV being a success. Sky has similar potential, and with the completion of its new studios shortly, I expect them to be producing a lot more original British drama.

    But I’d be fooling myself if I did not recognise that we have a long way to go before we get anywhere near the success of the US big hitters. The British streamers are unlikely to get anywhere near as big as Netflix or Disney, but we might be able to compete on more equal terms with StarzPlay and Apple + and take it from there.

  • I've no doubt our broadcasters will still be capable of making good shows OB, but the question is, will anyone be watching them by then? But as for streamers like Starz, I expect further changes in the media landscape and not all the American streamers will survive.

    Sky is a interesting example as its now owned by the Americans as is CH5, so perhaps the question should be, does it matter who owns the broadcasters as long as British shows are still made?

  • There are superb foreign language channels out there. I recently watched Arctic Circle with English subtitles as it's all in Finnish. It's a good series worth watching. Much better than the usual American rubbish.

    Arctic Circle (aka Ivalo) is set in the unforgiving polar region, amidst the icy landscapes of Finnish Lapland. After Nina Kautsalo, a Finnish police officer, finds a dying prostitute in an old cabin in the wilderness, the ensuing criminal investigation takes a surprise twist when a deadly virus is discovered in the prostitute's blood. However, when Thomas Lorenz, a German virologist, travels to Lapland to investigate the virus, he and Nina suddenly find themselves in the middle of an exceedingly unusual criminal investigation.

    https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6800294/

  • It's dirty tactics. Years ago they used to have their fake detector vans but now with the digital age it is so much easier to detect people yet they still turn to these peeping toms and con men to try catch folk out. I think it's disgusting how they are going after the elderly too.

    Here's the best way to deal with them. :D

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  • This is an interesting read on how 5G will improve video quality, reduce latency and so on.

    https://www.tvbeurope.com/media-delivery…nd-contribution

    [EXTRACT]

    5G will significantly impact live production for sports and news applications, empowering broadcasters to deliver superior video quality, with improved reliability and lower latency.

    The low-latency capabilities of 5G will be a game changer for live sports production. Currently, with the 4G/LTE technology, there are a few seconds delay between the capture and the reception of the live videos which will be then edited. This makes it challenging to use 4G/LTE networks with multiple cameras for live sports production. 5G technology and the recent improvements AVIWEST made on video compression algorithms reduce the end-to-end transmission latency to 200 milliseconds or less. This reduced delay from the live source to the video production is a huge advancement.

    Major sports events are already using a combination of fixed and wireless cameras to deliver multiple camera views. These mixes of wired and wireless production solutions use different technologies (some of them are quite old and are not IP-based, such as OFDM/microwave transmitters, satellite transmission, etc.) and are very complex to manage. Typically, a large sports event requires a comprehensive architecture that must be managed and maintained during the live production. Replacing these complex architectures with full 5G mobile and wireless cameras drastically simplifies the live production and improves flexibility and scalability. In addition to that, it is also much cheaper than using traditional production solutions.

  • Streaming is starting to have impact.

  • Streaming is starting to have impact.

    Indeed. I think the best solution for Channel 4 would be to scrap all but one of its subsidiary channels and just keep the main Channel 4 and Film4 channels. Then enhance the All4 platform to include as much programming as they can muster with both SVOD and AVOD options.

    Channel 4 is lacking in original dramas these days, and I think they need to commission more of these, maybe making some of them available only on their streamer. It’s the publicity for good dramas that attracts viewers to the streamers.

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