I can draw a flying car with lasers attached to it, doesn't mean it would actually happen. And if someone built the flying laser car later, I can't take credit for it just because I doodled it on a napkin years before it was created.
It's cool that some people at the BBC tried to make a video streaming app. Many companies tried, several successfully, yet Netflix beat all of them for a whole variety of reasons. I seriously doubt BBC had the engineering talent to defeat Netflix, even if there weren't millions of regulations preventing a government-owned media company from innovating.
I'm in the UK and our local ISP was doing Video on Demand over TCP/IP around 2000, it also had online shopping (deals with local stores), movies and TV shows.
They where early with a massive ADSL rollout so they had the bandwidth when much of the country was still on dial-up.
We had it as part of the beta period when I lived at home and it was really good for the time.
Actually earlier than that, 2002/3 iirc, I know as I tried it out and it at the time used a p2p distribution method, which was a bit aggressive and you could close the client and still get requests days later from other clients due to caching.
Which for online gaming and the cutting edge broadband of 1MB down, just didn't sit well with me. So I gave up on it.
Also of note, they did trial 3G before it rolled out publicly with Three and one of the first tests was to stream a film, which they did (The Matrix) as a test, this was 2002 . I know this as spoke with few of the chaps working on it at the time over lunch one day as I was working for the World Service upon a digital playout system that would see the death of tape and full digital end-end system for the entire BBC radio output. Fun times.
Though around that time the current government (Labour) was busy outsourcing much of the BBC and we saw many whole area's tupped out, which was sad as I'd previously worked at the DOH and saw the whole splitting up and effective prioritisation of whole rafts of the DOH/NHS under the guise of outsourcing and other less well thought out short term quick fix, long -term debt bombing nightmares.
See that's kinda the thing - politics and such things often clash and in the UK it's been a see-saw of one party then the other which has seen many short-sighted moves for short term on paper gains of back patting, and the fallout pushed onto the other party once they take power. Hence many things over the past few decades been stymied and handicapped in the UK in government departments. Seen some serious talent wasted, messed about and general mistreated - just to make a set of accounts look good in the short term.
Actually, the misunderstanding is yours. Technical issues are a small part of the challenge. The 'iPlayer' is not the product, for the most part, the content is.
Because UK competitors are not going to provide the BBC any content, and they don't have the kind financing to buy from the US, who even then were not up for this kind of deal and it took an incredible bit of BD innovation by Netflix to even get that going. The BBC would have been be able to put its own content on the web, and not much more, which is not much of an innovation.
Finally, there's a good reason the BBC's charter is limiting in scope, like any other business, how would you like it if you were suddenly found out of a job because someone with incredible power in the government was able to waive their hands, raise taxes/fees thereby 'forcing customers to exist' for their competing product, which is probably inferior by virtue of the fact they don't actually have to provide much value at all and can continue on with their guaranteed revenue stream?
That’s not entirely fair IMO. The BBC already had deals with ITV and Channel 4 to put their content on the new Project Kangaroo service before it was killed off.
It's fair because there's an underlying competitive issue: if said new project represented in any way a threat to those other entities, they would not, or stop providing the content.
For example, Disney has pulled their content from Netflix.
> The BBC iPlayer was streaming video to the whole of the U.K. in 2007.
Exactly. In 2007, The BBC believed that the UK == The World with iPlayer. So no innovation from them happened until a new challenger approached.
I was on holiday in another country and attempted to watch iPlayer shows and access was blocked (and is still blocked) even with a VPN and I used to pay for their TV license at the time. I'm not surprised why many kids these days choose online instead of TV to watch when they want, where-ever they want rather than wait. Also BBC iPlayer programmes still have a habit of 'vanishing' if you wait too long.
The technology was available only in the UK and the BBC was ahead of its time with iPlayer but Netflix said "Thanks for your idea and we're very inspired by the BBC..." and repeated this and made it accessible to the whole world which the BBC is still left wondering why they didn't succeed after getting disturbed by Netflix in 2010.
> Exactly. In 2007, The BBC believed that the UK == The World with iPlayer
The complaints you make are largely directives from the regulator. The BBC has only recently managed to get the regulations relaxed so it is permitted to keep programming on iPlayer longer than a couple of weeks. The lack of access outside the UK largely stems from its requirement to licence content from independent producers and enable them to re-sell the content to other international broadcasters. You couldn't watch iPlayer overseas because in many cases the BBC (due to regulators' directives) did not hold the rights to show its programming to you outside the UK.
One of the reasons the BBC could not have defeated Netflix is because the regulations say that the BBC is not allowed to out-compete commercial companies. Several BBC operations have been forced to close because they were too successful.
I'd argue the BBC actually has quite some talent working for them. Just have a look at their Open Source Website [0], these aren't the projects of the average company.
The platform they run currently is already capable of a lot, and given their knowledge about media production and delivery they, of all the companies out there would have the engineering talent.
Anecdotal, but a couple years ago I spoke with an engineer working at the BBC and he had nothing but praise for the kind of state-of-the-art work they were doing (our initial topic was GPU clusters), most of it on Red Hat Linux — in sharp contrast with most of this industry apparently, at least historically.
They really seemed to have a well-funded, well-hired and well-meaning engineering department.
Yeah, paywise you could get more working for some bank etc in the private sector and my first job working for Eastern ELectricity Board saw me on a £3k salary a year (1983), left and tripled that.
When I worked for the BBC (2002) I was on £42k a year, official title was DBA, though did more non DBA work and was at a level in which I could tell the top people my views and what needed to be done and they listened.
Thing is in tech, it's not what you're paid per year, it's how many hours you work for that pay a year. Could have a £50k job and work 9-5 or a £50k job and end up cutting 80 hours weeks all the time. Details like that are never reflected in the salary.
And how good the work is. In the Beeb, I worked on interesting projects, for a worthy cause, using a tech stack chosen collectively by the team. Many of the projects instigated by the team, rather than pushed on to us from elsewhere.
Since leaving, a lot of the work I have done has been boring and predetermined.
I might add - the pay has got much worse since you were there. The collective pay increase was 1% most years, which also applied to the banding so would have affected new hires as well. Since 2011, the pension has been no better than in any other organisation.
As an employee, not having a TV license if you needed done was gross misconduct. Which is probably still the case.
As for the license - personally that needed overhauling years ago, should just pop a % tax on all these streaming and subscription services and cover the bbc from that. Alas it has so many niche area's and legacy that to transition to a private entity would change it into something people would not like or appreciate and kill it - that seems in part to be known by government at least. Also, BBC monitoring and things like that have a role for the country/government.
I pay money to you to develop a TV program, you sell that TV program to Netflix and make money, and then you tax me purchasing the product. So instead of being content with fleecing me once, you want to fleece me three times...er, no. And the idea of funding yourself by taxing your competition is utterly repellent.
I am not unfamiliar with the BBC, most of my knowledge about Kangaroo came from someone I knew who was on the Trust, but it is just a totally broken institution. I have never managed to work out if the hiring policy just finds bad people or something happens to people they hire after they start working there but it is just horribly broken.
>I pay money to you to develop a TV program, you sell that TV program to Netflix and make money, and then you tax me purchasing the product. So instead of being content with fleecing me once, you want to fleece me three times...er, no. And the idea of funding yourself by taxing your competition is utterly repellent.
No, that's not what I suggested, as I was advocating replacing the TV license, not running it in parallel as you portray, so no, just no.
>I am not unfamiliar with the BBC, most of my knowledge about Kangaroo came from someone I knew who was on the Trust, but it is just a totally broken institution. I have never managed to work out if the hiring policy just finds bad people or something happens to people they hire after they start working there but it is just horribly broken.
You seem to confuse your experience with `management` and project that upon all staff and without qualifying what you class as `bad` and yet happily postulate that as record, most odd.
Haha, you really don't get this. I have already paid the licence fee, you have already the developed the program...you are just charging me a third time for it.
The BBC Trust isn't (wasn't) "management".
I class as bad almost everything you have said. It is self-evident. Fundamentally, I disagree with people being ripped off.
For people that aren't necessarily just chasing a higher salary, it can be very satisfying to work at a place like the BBC, or some parts of the government, charities, academia, NGOs etc.
You work to benefit the public in some way, you can usually talk freely about your job (and therefore people are more interested to listen), and there's probably less stress.
It's cool that some people at the BBC tried to make a video streaming app. Many companies tried, several successfully, yet Netflix beat all of them for a whole variety of reasons. I seriously doubt BBC had the engineering talent to defeat Netflix, even if there weren't millions of regulations preventing a government-owned media company from innovating.