The flip side of this is the actually find out what people want to watch and when, and can spend budget accordingly.
Comment on The BBC’s proposal to switch off Freeview is a threat to its universal service | Letter
mjr@infosec.pub 1 day ago
Companies hate broadcasts because they can’t track viewers as easily and gather data on them to use or sell.
Codpiece@feddit.uk 1 day ago
mjr@infosec.pub 1 day ago
Except they don’t, which is why they’re losing ground. Also, the BBC mission is “to serve all audiences” and “inform, educate and entertain” and not simply to give people whatever junk TV gets the biggest audiences: that’s more ITV/STV and 5.
FishFace@piefed.social 1 day ago
Yeah that’s why the BBC, subject to gdpr, proposed doing this 8 years in the future. It’s cheaper for the BBC to switch off broadcasts, that’s the simple and sufficient reason, not conspiracy needed.
mjr@infosec.pub 1 day ago
That doesn’t make sense because that would be a really stupid and dangerous line of argument for them. It’s even cheaper for the BBC to close, if that’s the logic they want to pretend they’re using.
FishFace@piefed.social 1 day ago
What are you talking about? Whose argument should be that? The BBC’s? Why would they say that broadcast is worth user privacy, when they aren’t violating anyone’s privacy?
It’s even cheaper for the BBC to close what? iPlayer? But the proportion of video content being watched by streaming is increasing; cutting it makes no sense at all. Maybe you meant something else, in which case you should be more precise.
mjr@infosec.pub 1 day ago
They might not be violating it, in the sense that they operate within the law, but they do invade your privacy if you use iPlayer by collecting “your name and contact details, your date of birth or financial details […] your email address and age. Device information […] Location information […] Information on your activities outside the BBC […] the articles you read and the programmes you watch.” They use it, among other things “to check if you’re using BBC iPlayer and to keep the licensing database accurate […] to personalise services and give you things more tailored to your tastes […] to show you relevant advertising on another company’s site […] to help us understand what kind of services you might use And sometimes how you might share things with other people g. to recommend things we think might interest you […] to show you advertising when you access a BBC service from outside the UK”. They share it with other companies “When we use other companies to power our services […] When you use another company’s service that connects to us […] When we do collaborative research” (all quotes from the BBC Privacy and Cookies Policy).
I don’t think most viewers realise the broad consent that the BBC demands before it will let you watch iPlayer. Just the privacy section of their terms is 20 screenfuls on my laptop: it’ll be more than that on a smart TV, so it’s obviously going to be “too long: didn’t read” for most people. It’s not an informed choice. Once upon a time, the BBC would have been educating the public about these privacy drawbacks with streaming, not only marketing its own streaming services.
The BBC would say that some broadcast costs are worth more viewer privacy if they cared about public benefit.
No, close the BBC. If the BBC want to say that cost is the main problem with broadcasting, then the next step is to say we close BBC TV entirely (or maybe except for one or two news channels) and save even more. Saying it’s cheaper to close things that deliver public benefit is an absurd argument for them to use.
The proportion of video content being watched by streaming is increasing because even the BBC is advertising and marketing streaming over all else. There are numerous adverts/trailers for its programmes shown on its broadcast services which don’t give a time or date of broadcast, but simply say “watch on BBC iPlayer” at the end. Unsurprisingly, if you have something the size of the BBC saying repeatedly to do something, the number of people doing it will increase.
Broadcasts still have value and should be the core of the BBC. It’s not the BSC, after all.