Submitted 1 day ago by fne8w2ah@lemmy.world to unitedkingdom@feddit.uk
For the first time, you’d need a subscription to watch “free-to-air” UK TV.
Umm… you need a subscription now. It’s called a “TV License”.
“no longer a universal service”
You have to pay to receive it and there are people who don’t pay so it isn’t “universal” right now.
The general idea at some point is fine but 2034 sounds way too soon.
Unless the BBC plan to provide like 25+ Mbit unlimited data for the cost of a TV license? If that was part of this plan then fuck I am all for it.
20 years in the future where rural broadband infrastructure has improved to the point where everyone can get a guaranteed 10Mbps+ it might make sense but until then there will be too many people left with nothing if their broadcast TV disappears.
They’ll still have FM radios and fresh printed copies of yesterdays news.
Most of the research pushing against the switch off is driven by Arqiva, who runs the transmitters, lol.
I cannot see how in 8 years the vast majority doesn’t have some sort of suitable broadband just to exist let alone replace an old freeview set that will likely need replacing in that time frame anyway.
We are already down to 3% of households now, and less than 50k households that do not get 10mbs+. In eight years we will have fixed almost all of that, and aged out a lot of the older demographic that has worse adoption.
Cost aspect I get and agree with, we should be ensuring people on pension credit and other low income benefits get free broadband anyway, its getting increasingly difficult to interact with Government and Local Services without it.
I can watch 4 HD TV streams currently, I doubt my internet can manage that.
Yeah, that’s still 50k who can’t reliably stream and those tend to be already the most isolated and often vulnerable people already, I see a lot of them trying to maintain their existing connections and 8 years will make a good bit of difference but there will be people who sadly slip through the cracks but I guess that’s always the way with progress.
WTF? They’re switching off broadcast TV?
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.
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.
Codpiece@feddit.uk 1 day ago
The flip side of this is the actually find out what people want to watch and when, and can spend budget accordingly.
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.