Yet another arm of the establishment is going to go on strike.
Please guys, go out and stay out. Never ever come back, that’ll show ’em!
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23 comments to BBC to strike? Hurrah! |
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I just heard BBC Radio 4 news attribute a jump in the rate of inflation to warmer weather, will we be deprived of such conflation of issues, a nod to AGW?
I have no TV, so I hardly care, but good news if the masses see the fog lift, even if only for a few hours.
Question: do you get a rebate on your tv license for the time they are off air?
I advise a year long stoppage.
A good post.
And a hope I fondly share.
Interesting that TV owners have no right to withhold payment to employees of the Beeb, but the employers have the right to withhold their labour.
In order to get more payment from same TV owners.
Quite so Chip.
Although, sadly, Americans face a trick.
To get Fox News one must (normally) get cable – and “bundled” in with Fox News are such things as CNN and MSNBC (which the people who pay for Fox News do not want – but have to pay for anyway).
The same result (a subsidy for the left) by different means.
But Paul, that “bundling” is not by government mandate; you are (in theory) free to negotiate your own terms with your cable provider.
‘in theory’ is the operative part here, since you only have one provider available in any particular area.
That’s no longer entirely true, Alisa. There may be only one cable provider, but there are other options, such as satellite TV, internet streaming, etc. Still, I agree that I would prefer to be able to select cable channels a la carte. There’s lots of crud in the bundled packages I have absolutely no interest in, but have to buy anyway.
You misunderstand. Bundling is not to increase viewer choice, it’s to expand the space that can be sold to advertisers. Whether anyone is watching said dead-end channel is entirely beside the point.
But Shhh… don’t tell the ad guys, ok?
Yes Laird, I forgot to add the word ‘cable’. My point still stands to the limited extent that Paul’s does.
FWIW, I don’t entirely agree on the bundling thing. I buy lots of things that are bundled, and don’t use everything in there. For example, I buy Microsoft Word which has thousands of features, and I only use perhaps 20% of them (even less since they added the ribbon interface, meaning that I can’t find anything anymore.) I buy an internet connection, and I use less that 0.1% of the web sites it makes available to me.
A la carte has pros and cons, just as bundling does. Specifically, the high transaction costs associated with separation and management of different choices, and the reduced back end negotiating power. I don’t know what the situation is with cable, it’d be nice to go a la carte, but it might cost considerably more to get the same I get in the package deal.
And for sure @mojo, the whole purpose of cable TV is to make advertising space to balance satisfying your viewing needs against the inconvenience of viewing ads and that is surely something we lovers of the free market embrace? If you want uninterrupted viewing, Amazon and Netflix are happy to offer it.
Who the hell buys MS word these days when there is Libre Office or Open Office etc. for free? 😀
Mojo said: You misunderstand. Bundling is not to increase viewer choice, it’s to expand the space that can be sold to advertisers. Whether anyone is watching said dead-end channel is entirely beside the point.
No, no.
Channels that nobody watches get dropped by their makers, because nobody will buy ads on them, and thus they lose money; the Nielsen data that shows viewership is independent of the creators and carriers.
Those channels “nobody watches” actually have niche viewerships and are profitable.
(Bundling is best viewed as “flat rate pricing”; ala Disneyland or a vacation package. You pay to get in, then watch (or ride, or visit) whatever you want, no limits.
Transaction costs and option value are real things, not to be dismissed “because I know I only ever want to watch two channels, thus this model is just bad”*.
* My own use case; I literally have cable TV [as opposed to internet, which I have for obvious reasons] to watch Food Network. Nothing else. Ever. But I don’t believe for a second I’d pay significantly less with a magic package that gave me “just one channel” – fixed operating costs and lack of ad revenue sold by the subscriber would balance that our REAL fast.)
And if there really were a la carte pricing, a lot of the channels would probably go out of business, because most of the people wouldn’t pay the much higher per-channel price for them. Even many of the channels you or I might like to get a la carte in order not to pay for the others.
@Sigivald
>I’d pay significantly less with a magic package that gave me “just one channel” – fixed operating costs and lack of ad revenue sold by the subscriber would balance that our REAL fast.)
This is an excellent point. I don’t know the economics of cable TV real well, but it would not surprise me AT ALL if the channels actually paid the cable companies to carry their channel rather than the other way round, so that they could make money on the ad revenue. Meaning that the more channels the cheaper your bill. I don’t know if that is actually true or not, but there are certainly some realistic numbers for the economics calculation to say that it might work that way.
I used to write software for the newspaper industry. They used to talk about the “news hole” that is the space left in the paper to put the news after they sold the ad space. Which kind of tells you the priorities and how newspapers are (or were) really paid for.
I would have, when I had a TV, been happy to pay for advert-free commercial channels of my choice, and let the rest go. TV is really now a fragmented youtube.
Mr Ed
> I would have, when I had a TV, been happy to pay for advert-free commercial channels of my choice,
Amazon and Netflix among others provide this, and do a fabulous job doing so.
> and let the rest go. TV is really now a fragmented youtube.
I wonder why TV does survive this competition. Actually, I think one of the most important things, little discussed in these matters, is, ironically, the social aspect of TV, and the restriction of choice of TV.
A while ago I binged watched the whole of Grey’s Anatomy (don’t judge me please), and enjoyed it. However, I missed out a huge part of that which the TV watchers got out of it, the anticipation and waiting for the next episode (in fact the cliff hanger is one of the most important parts of many TV series) and the opportunity to have a shared experience with co-workers who watched the same episode at the same time as me, and where we could talk about it at the water cooler, discuss what we thought, consider what might happen next etc.
So ironically, I think a lot of value from TV comes from the restrictions it has, and the social aspects it generates. Both of which seem non obvious, in fact counter intuitive.
In fact even well made commercails are enjoyable and interesting, witness the hype around SuperBowl TV advertising here in the USA.
Ted, so be it. I don’t ask for my tastes to be subsidised in either public or private venues. I am sure it would be better overall in any case. Though much better to actually allow some competition in the market. Without that, there will be perverse incentives aplenty.
Sadly so Ian Bennett sadly so – I wish I could argue with you, but the facts are on your side.
People who work for business organisations (such as Comcast in the United States, or Sky Sat in Britain) also go to university and have ideological assumptions “educated” into them (without the need for government regulations).
I do not want CNN, I never watch CNN (I may watch RT or Al Jazeera to find out what the enemy propaganda line is – but CNN is too muddled and confused even for that purpose) yet there is it is on my Sky service (even though I do not want it).
One of the reasons that I do not have Virgin Cable is that they advertise CNN as one of their stations – they do not advertise Fox News on their promotional (“look what channels we offer”) material, which tells me all I need to know about the people at Virgin Cable.
However, I will end on an optimistic note.
I believe that technology will lead to a state of affairs where people do not have stations they do not want.
I also believe the BBC tax (the “license fee”) is doomed.
I may not live to see the end of this system – but it will end (and only a few years from now). Ditto “bundling” by Comcast and co.
We were originally discussing news channels such as FOX or CNN, none of which is available online, and which are bundled by cable carriers, with the choice of the latter being non-existent (my original point). Whether bundling of these news channels makes the cost of a single channel for the end user lower or higher than an a la carte arrangement, I am not sure.
It’s been said here in several ways but the bundling is forced subsidizing of channels that simply cannot support themselves. This is the reason I do not think you will ever see a la carte pricing. I have cancelled Hulu+ because I simply refuse to subsidize certain, um, ‘tastes’ in programming.
In the U.S. we have PBS ( Public Broadcasting System ) which leans so far left, they have to propped up with a stick to keep from falling over. They are subsidized with my tax money but there is little I can do about it. From time to time they have ‘fund drives’ or marathons where they put on something with wide appeal ( a good movie or documentary ) and then interrupt every few minutes to ask for money. This goes on and on and on. They tell us how their programing is what people really want to see. If that’s true, then drop the tax money, stop soliciting donations and get out and COMPETE. They actually know full well that they would fail miserably if that were tried ( it’s been tried and failed on radio more than once ).
I ‘cut the cable’ several years ago. There are a lot of over the air channels in my area and I know how to build and use antennas. Between OTA and the internet I can find almost anything I want, certainly far more than I have the time to waste ( in many cases ) viewing.
For what it’s worth, it seems to me that Sigivald and Fraser Orr have the straight of it. I would guess that at least for most channels, what one pays for the channels one wants is less if they’re carried as part of a bundle than if one were to subscribe to them independently. What I found infuriating (back when I still was foolish enough to have TV) was that no matter the channel most of what it carried was, to me, junk.
Skating. Dog Shows. Fox News. 24. And even then it depended who was doing the broadcasts of the skating and the dog shows.
And the metaphor of “á la carte” vs. “table d’hôte” is also apt. Order your dinner item by item, you almost always pay more than if you order one of menu’s dinners, at least if you compare like with like. Of course, if all you order is a side salad you won’t pay as much as if you’d gotten the steak dinner.
Now I’m hungry. :>)
“Subsidies”? There’s an interesting issue about “subsidizing” vs. “punishing” when a company is considering how to price its service to different customers. I used to be involved in running the data-communications service for a smallish outfit that did data-processing for banks. There was an ongoing argument between the head of the systems department and my boss (he and I constituted the data-communications group) over whether we should be charging distant banks more than nearby banks for the same service, since our costs to serve the former would be higher (we paid for the phone charges–in the ’70’s datacomm was telecomm). My guy said it was unfair to base charges partly on distance, since that was “punishing” the more distant banks. The Veep, on the contrary, said it would be unfair not to include distance in the pricing, as to leave it out would have the nearby banks subsidizing the others. Me, I was more in sympathy with the VP’s position, if there was going to be a moral argument.