BBC license fee ‘to be abolished in 2027’. What will that mean?
- Thread starter bimble
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chilango
Hypothetical Wanker
A 'good thing'? I dunno, that's quite simplistic. I'm not going to campaign to defund the BBC or anything. But I won't care if it happens. Those flowers keep blooming anyway.
Aha!
It was difficult to understand the nuances at first - but I'm glad we persevered.
mauvais
on reddit or something
Whether you are interested in rebuilding parity or not, currently £5bn a year (£4bn public money) goes on producing and sustaining the centralised state media to supposedly inform, educate and entertain the people.
You complain about people being hostage to the idea that the only replacement for this is an a American corporate equivalent. You have an idea that these are not the available options.
But on the hypothetical day that it does go away, the population's media consumption will not die with it, it will merely be displaced. £5bn a year worth of it. So what I'm asking you, as always with such things, is how are you going to arrive at any kind of point where your alternative ideas are actually going to be a significant part of that?
danny la rouge
More like *fanny* la rouge!
YouTube is shit.
The whole thing reminds me of political discussions in which people can't cope with the idea that you don't want the Conservatives or Labour. That they are both shit, because they are both based on terrible assumptions about how the world should work. Where you say, "Keir Starmer is awful, he supports neoliberal projects" and the response is, "So what, you want to have Boris Johnson instead then?" And vice versa. Like even conceptualising something that is neither of these options is too big a stretch and should be abandoned for the sake of a pragmatic status quo. You think the BBC isn't some great bastion of truth and greatness, so the only alternative is that you support the release of unfettered free-martketism.
Again, I'm not personally agitating for the destruction of the BBC. I'm just saying that I don't see any great worth in it. Not in terms of its output and not in terms of its inherent existence. But just because I am apathetic to its fate, doesn't mean it's not up to me to say what, if anything, should replace it.
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bimble
floofy
It’s wonderful for ‘how to do this very specific DIY thing’ videos from odd men all over the world.
It's also wonderful if you have niche interests in things that other people with similar niche interests enjoy making content about. Things that no large institutions would never make TV programmes for.
bimble
floofy
Sure. As said already I hardly use the bbc but I also don’t use buses. All the people who do use the bbc they’re not going to start watching niche YouTube instead.
Lord Camomile
Yipchaa!
The trouble to me is that experience seems to suggest the majority will just pivot to what's easiest and/or ubiquitous. Sure, many of us might create or seek out things beyond the mainstream, but most will just consume what Murdoch, Bezos and Walt serve up, and the messages and values contained therein, which is what really concerns me.
People watch shite? Bit annoying when overdone, but fine. People watch stuff that convinces them capital is good, fear the other, work for profit, think of yourself? That's what I'm more concerned with...
There's a good chance I'm too linked to 'old media', and things are different outside of traditional news and broadcasting, and younger generations won't fall into the same traps so easily.
I guess I don't see telly in the same category as public transport. I've said that several times already.
Winot
I wholeheartedley agree with your viewpoint
Definitely one wing of the Tories (the one in the driving seat right now). But there’s another set of Tories that love all the monarchy/last night of the proms/Archers shit.
The BBC is a convenient punchbag that they love to hate but probably when it comes to it will want to keep, if only to have a convenient punchbag.
danny la rouge
More like *fanny* la rouge!
Except they spend ages telling you their life story and you give up waiting and try another video that does the same thing so you never find out.
My attention span is too short for YouTube. I only ever use it in conjunction with this place, and even then I don’t watch the whole video.
Lord Camomile
Yipchaa!
danny la rouge
More like *fanny* la rouge!
It’s too irritating.Fucking hell!
chilango
Hypothetical Wanker
This is all predicated on the idea that I share the view that the TV produced by the BBC's private rivals is somehow 'worse' than the BBC's or that by remaining in the hands of the BBC the cultural output is somehow 'better'.
I don't
I think they're pretty much the same.
Lord Camomile
Yipchaa!
For me, it's more that I think the pathway to stuff on the far horizons is clearer with the former than the latter, because of previously waffled concerns about what values people will osmosisise*.
*it's a word
chilango
Hypothetical Wanker
Wait Til the ACG launches its channel.
danny la rouge
More like *fanny* la rouge!
We have a channel. I’m on it.
mauvais
on reddit or something
No, it's not predicated on this - I disagree with you on the point, but it's irrelevant. The case you are trying to make is that people ought to be able to see beyond these two binary possibilities. For this, it doesn't actually matter whether one is better or worse than the other, it matters whether you can offer anything else feasible that we are fools for not having taken seriously.
maomao
普費斯
I don't think that for the most part they're claiming it's better; it's just that they don't want to watch ads.
maomao
普費斯
Roughly contemporaneous with them nurturing and covering for several known paedophiles than?
chilango
Hypothetical Wanker
It's already on offer. People make and consume it. They'll continue to do so. My own view is that this is the "best" way of doing culture.
People also consume mass produced culture, and will continue to do so. The market does this just as well/badly as the BBC.
I just don't see that anything of value will be lost if the BBC goes, and I've yet to see any convincing argument for the benefits of the BBC.
mauvais
on reddit or something
Your DIY content production model effectively amounts to making something then putting it on YouTube & similar and is effectively now entirely co-opted by corporations to sell products and your data, or where this is resisted, behind subscription, often funded by individual consumers (e.g. via Patreon) in exchange for private reward, i.e. not public service. This is not only unfortunate but essentially inevitable since scaling to significant audiences is enormously expensive and can only be provisioned by a few specialist media companies. Even most of these basically cannot do live broadcast and multicast that, guess what, traditional PSB is actually good at.
You can argue probably correctly about the motivations of the establishment, but it's not at parity. All private media is wholly capitalist and profit-driven rather than anything based on more holistic representation, and if you think this is nonsense, try finding e.g. women's football coverage, products and services that are accessible to the visually impaired, or an equivalent to the Covid-era education programming.
This is why I said I really don't think people have thought very hard about this.
NoXion
Craicy the Squirrel
Except that unlike with "smart" TVs and freeview boxes, you can install ad-blocking plugins to your browser, and sideload YouTube Vanced (which also enables you to listen to videos with the screen off) onto your mobile device.
Smokeandsteam
Working Class First
Correct. As Novara media and others have been discovering of late the ‘DIY model’ has to be hosted somewhere: and the avowedly sociallly progressive neo-liberals of big tech are extremely censorious. This is where I part company with the airy demand to ‘build something better’. There isn’t a practical, scaleable way to do it without the control of big tech.
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