Dorries is as odious as the rest of her colleagues and on a mission to nobble the “lefty” BBC but could this all backfire?
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I’m going to get very cross. We were promised in around 1995 that the licence fee would disappear around 1997. And yet somehow here we are and it’s round our necks till 2027.
The removal of free licences for the over-75’s was the final straw. There’s a complete refusal to understand the poverty and the misery of old age for so many in the UK. The BBC has walked away from its public service obligations.
Neither has it taken so many of the obvious commercial opportunities it had. The BBC has sat around on its ar$e squandering the many advantages it had on a worldwide scale when the market for digital content really started taking off worldwide. While continuing to suck on the UK public teat. I have no time for the waste they’ve made of things. They could have seized and exploited the commercial value of what they already had to create a sound income stream to finance their public service obligations and still provide news, drama, and education worldwide - and maintain British influence and prestige.
Look at what ITV, Netflix and Amazon have done. They all started with far less than the BBC had.
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You do realise both of these make VAST losses at their content divisions, have very few shows anyone actually watches and are generally run as loss leaders to get customers to subscribe? In fact the entire Prime Video product exists really to get people to subscribe to Prime. Fewer people watch things like The Crown than your average daytime CBeebies show, but Netflix are absolutely desperate to be seen as a serious content creator so they pump extraordinary amounts of money into critically acclaimed much talked about shows that no one (in the grand scheme of things) actually watches. Using either of these companies as an example is very much a ‘Hitler got the trains to run on time’ as they are in no way examples of the future of content creation or delivery. The market is already fragmenting and they’re suffering. ITV nearly became part of Sky not too long ago as it’s had far more downs than ups recently. The entire reason the whole network is like a series of social media memes is precisely because they put so much focus into creating social media memes. Shows like Love Island exist for the amount of shareable content they can create, and how many memeable moments they can create. Their adrev from traditional channels is so temperamental these days they need to focus on online as their traditional model is pretty broken. They are not exactly a shining example of how to do things either. I’m not sure what is, but it’s not how they do it.
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Interesting 
None of this surprises me Kirstea.
It all just goes to show what the BBC threw away. They were so much better positioned. And they’ve wasted it.
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Seem to remember when the licence fee was reintroduced for pensioners over 70 or75 recently the UK Government said it was nothing to do with them,it was the BBC that had done it.Strange now that the Government are dictating a licence freeze and future decisions about the BBC.
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Do people have to pay for iPlayer? Certainly seems so as they bang on about as often as humanly possible.
As regards Netflix, I pay just under €9/month for Netlix France but can go weeks without even looking in and am seriously thinking of cancelling. Endless series and episodes suck you in interminably, always hoping it will get better, and the only reason I haven’t given them the boot is the very occasional really good show. documentary or fiction. But getting like hen’s teeth.
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I would be delighted to pay a subscription to the BBC to have access to all their back catalogue. It’s one of the things that frustrates me about i-player. I really don’t want to be having to use a VPN. I’d much rather I could openly support them. Even some of their “sounds” links these days I’m told aren’t available when I click on them.
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Lol. Ever heard of BBC Studios? Generally ploughs around £200M annually back into the corporate BBC through, among other things, content sales worldwide.
Harder to quantify is the soft power generated through the work of the BBC…it is still one of the most recognised brand names internationally.
The crock of cretins running the UK right now don’t seem to be happy with a simple withdrawal from the most important free trade organistaion in the world, but also seem hell-bent on destroying British soft power by defunding the BBC and the British Council. An absolute disgrace.
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Me too.
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A decision which was orchestrated by the Tories in 2015 when they decided to end the funding for this policy which had been introduced by Labour in 1999…free licences for the 75+ group had always been subsidised by the government not the BBC.
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I love Netflix for all the things I watch in Japanese and Korean, live action and anime. Each to each 
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Thank you Kirstea,
That is also my understanding. I started writing a similar post but lost the will to live before I could finish it.
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SuePJ this was the sense of my rant earlier. All around the world there are people like us willing to pay. The number of people accessing the BBC using VPN’s from the USA alone, is phenomenal. These are people who are willing to pay quite often. Many around the world would like to access the BBC
Not just the backlist. The news and documentary coverage that had so much respect around the world. Inventing formats like Strictly (OK, that one they did exploit by licensing it around the world) and Bake Off wbich was an idea they got off the ground when it was brought to them, but stupidly failed to secure. To say nothing of the depth of their production skills for so many formats.
Such an advantage, having a these assets to leverage, and all in a world lingua franca…English. All that advantage thrown away. The BBC has wasted the opportunity sitting in front of them, losing their enormous assets bit by bit whilst sucking on domestic UK taxpayers’ money.
Kirstea will mention the issues with international content licensing, I think she is really close to IP and media from a legal point of view, will probably say no it’s not that simple 
Meanwhile Sue, have you checked out Britbox? Has a lot of BBC backlist. Still needs a VPN tbough.
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Ahem some people have been known to join up to Netflix whilst in Turkey…jus’ sayin
I can’t agree. To the best of my knowledge the BBC charter was never to be a greedy, shitty, money grabbing organisation.
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Absolutely. Dorries lying through her teeth like her boss.
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