While this sounds laudable as an idea, for this to work it also means that the British taxpayer is not allowed to subsidize BBC Worldwide in any way. For example, BBCW pays rent at market rates for its office space to the rest of the BBC, even though they're in the same building, and they're virtually prohibited from selling anything in the UK. Add in the fact that the rest of the British media business is (understandably) quite pissed off about having a competitor that operates under a different set of rules, meaning they watch it like a hawk and squawk as soon as there's even a hint of unfair advantage, and you get all sorts of bizarro-world conflicts and overblown solutions like this that throw the baby out with the bathwater.
(Disclaimer: I used to work for a company owned by BBC Worldwide. This is my personal opinion.)
Please abstain from just complaining. The BBC is a complex beast and I genuinely believe this policy was drafted with the BBC and the licence payers best interests at heart, but perhaps they should take another look at this policy and debate wether or not there is a better way to comply with the BBC charter whilst not limiting access to content for license fee payers.
trust.enquiries@bbc.co.uk
You may also contact Maria Miller, who is the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport to perhaps urge the BBC Trust to look into this issue.
enquiries@culture.gov.uk
And it wouldn't hurt to CC your local MP. http://www.writetothem.com
In fact, there was a concerted effort a few years back to shut down the entire BBC News website.
No one ask why the sky tax is higher than the license fee and sky produces virtually zero high quality programming as that woudl upset that nice Mr Murdoch and we cant have that now can we.
Radio 2 was deliberately hobbled as it was getting to successful.
It's not their decision.
You could of-course lobby your MP to get it changed, but I imagine there would be substantial opposition from both supporters and opponents of public media services to allowing BBC to run commercial services in the UK.
I thought the primary reason for it not running commercial services was so that its integrity as an independent source of news and culture wasn't compromised. So surely by running anything commercial, it is potentially compromised.
You can already see that by the type of programmes that get made these days. It's clear much of it is made to sell to the rest of the world, rather than just for a UK audience.
IMHO this is just breaking the net, and blatantly weird.
'Under the BBC’s Fair Trading rules commercial websites are not allowed to receive unfair promotion from the BBC’s public services.
'This prevents us from being able to provide Future content on BBC.co.uk. genres.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2208251/Global-BBC-w... (daily mail, so you have to scroll way down past the righteous indignation to get the facts)
e.g. I can still buy Doctor Who DVDs in the UK, even if the BBC can't advertise them between programmes.
So don't promote it on the publicly funded sites. Done.
>> 'This prevents us from being able to provide Future content on BBC.co.uk. genres.
All that's saying is "we can't put this stuff on our UK sites".
I'm not criticising the parent post by the way, but this just sounds like more non-reasons to me.
A number of years ago, the BBC ran a lot of websites that were extremely useful but not directly related to their broadcast output.
Unfortunately (for the general public), commercial broadcasters and publishers made persistant and vocal complaints that they were being irreparably harmed by the BBC entering into markets that were well outside their broadcasting remit. This led to a number of those sites getting shut down, and the BBC's web remit being considerably tightened inside the UK.
BBC Worldwide operates to a certain degree 'at arms length' from the publicly funded BBC, and is able to enter markets that are outside the BBC's normal remit. However, it is severely restrained on entering those markets in the UK, due to the perceived advantage the company has over other commercial competitors.
That's exactly what they are doing. The only sites the BBC are legally allowed to operate within the UK have to be publicly funded.
The problem is that I can't read an article that somebody else referred me to. He's already promoting it. I don't think it'd be unfair to give me access on that basis.
Browsing bbc.com through the front page? I'm not interested in that anyway.
LWN.net do "subscriber links", where a subscriber can share a subscriber-only article. What if bbc.com did that, so that readers can share an article with everyone?
This is subject to abuse, of course. LWN.net control it (presumably) by controlling subscriptions, since only subscribers can generate subscriber links and the links are unique and trackable. But I can think of some mitigation strategies for this, and am not sure that abuse will be such a big deal.
I was laughed at by the Danes, Swedes and Canadians I was with, because obviously the BBC always had adverts on.
Seriously, if the law says the BBC can't show adverts in the UK, they should make ad-free versions of the sites available, not an error message.
In fact, the issue here doesn't even seem to be adverts - it's that its a bbc.com article instead of a bbc.co.uk one - i.e a commercial service that isn't allowed to receive "promotion" here. As long as they don't link to it from the UK sites, I don't see how they are "promoting" it; we all found that link from a 3rd party source (i.e. HN) and wanted to read it! :/
It is ridiculous and the lawyers that cause this to happen are so short sighted about how the internet works that its laughable. However as my actions show, it is annoying enough for people to give up and just accept it.
A sensible worldwide url proxy-like would be great in order to bypass such country-based accesses. Oh, and letme.in is for sale!
Wanna see the BBC? paste letme.in in the url ; wanna see french public TV from abroad? do the same ; belgian public TV? go ahead
On a related note, lemonde.fr has similar weird rules (not state owned though). Coming from google news you can't see the full article http://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2013/03/04/grand-par... but copy pasting the title in google https://www.google.at/search?q=Grand+Paris+%3A+la+victoire+d... you just have to click on the first link to get the full article...
It has nothing to do with your license fee, and everything to do with the (vastly complex and totally out of my expertise) realms of International Copyright / Licensing Laws.
As ever, these things are really not simple enough to be covered by a blog post. Yes: the BBC's default page should be totally transparent (i.e. "You cannot view this because of agreement X, Y, Z", however, there's probably a clause in some contract preventing them from stating it - and no, that's not a joke) but this really is not the droid you're looking for to rant at.
Hint: If you're in Australia, the entire works of George Orwell are public domain; in the USA and the EU, this isn't the case. And yes, we need a serious shake up of the entire structure to progress, but this isn't the wet-stone to sharpen your axe on, trust me.
Ask why Disney gets 70+ years of Copyright, it's a far more egregious case.
10 July 2013
Dear Edward,
Thank you for writing to me with your concerns about why a particular BBC article (http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130701-why-you-feel-phanto...) cannot be viewed in the UK.
It is the case that some international BBC content cannot be viewed in the UK because it is not funded by the licence fee, but instead by BBC Worldwide which is a commercial enterprise.
I appreciate that this is frustrating but because BBC Worldwide is run commercially there is no obligation for the BBC to make international service content available in the UK.
Thanks again for bringing your concerns to my attention.
Yours sincerely,
Julian Huppert Member of Parliament for Cambridge
But it gets even more weird, as programmes made by the licence pay version of the BBC appear on the world service news. I was watching it a week ago in a hotel room and noticed they were showed Click, a programme made by the BBC in the UK. So what is that doing being shown on the commercial arm of the BBC?
BBC World News is distinct from BBC Worldwide, they're different commercial groups. It has a much closer relationship with BBC News, which is publicly funded. BBC Worldwide exists to make a profit, whereas BBC World News is commercially funded but not profit driven. It's...complicated.
Just to confuse matters, the World Service Click programme is not the same as the 'regular' BBC News one either.
Think the BBC should be privatised.. TopGear is worth a few million for a start...
You're "forced" to pay for the commercial channels every time you buy something that's advertised on them.
javascript:window.location.href=window.location.href.replace("bbc.com","bbc.com.nyud.net");
A better solution would be a greasemonkey script/browser extension but this does the job for now :-)
It would be far quicker to view the article via Coral Cache, the Way Back Machine or some other proxy, and it would be far more effective to write to the BBC Trust and/or your local MP.
If they called their international subsidiary, "Super Mega Global Worldwide Media Corporation", it wouldn't seem any more or less ridiculous than anyone else doing geo-targeting.
They aren't perfect by any means but have managed to produce some gems. They often don't fully appreciate that they are gems when making them mind you.
Please don't project your own opinions onto the rest of the UK.
Don't be ridiculous.
Reports suggest we'd make 6-7 billion on a sell off. Sell it and put the money towards buying back openreach because an infrastructure is what .gov should do, not content. =p
What I'm trying to say is that recently they tend produce content with a mind to how the US will receive this new content. Dr who, top gear and downton abbey for instance. All of these are popular in the US and while that isn't a bad thing (more money to the BBC to hopefully make more content) what I disagree with is that all they produce is more of the SAME content. They've lost innovation and only make content in a few genres with recurring themes.
>> Please don't project your own opinions onto the rest of the UK. how is my stating a personal opinion 'projecting my opinion onto the rest of the UK'? Isn't the point of a discussion to discuss your personal opinion or must I refrain from commenting because I happen to think strictly come dancing is a pile of poo and you think claudia 'needs a haircut' winkleman is brilliant? :D
* Sherlock
* Top Gear
* Luther
* Life On Mars
* Doctor Who
* The Thick Of It
* In The Flesh
* Being Human
* Africa
I could go on...
It's utterly ludicrous.
Now one would think that they could you know - strip the ads and not show them for UK IPs ...
bbc.co.uk does exactly that, there are ads shown externally but not internally.
