I understand the arguments against the way the Beeb is funded, and if I didn’t watch/listen to it I’d probably object too. It’s just that as soon as it goes to commercial funding it’ll be as shite as its commercial rivals, or dependent on charity drives like NPR.
General taxation instead of a licence fee? That’s just a sleight of hand, surely? Although if you didn’t have to go buy the licence people may not complain as much.
(I probably still consume more BBC stuff than any other media company despite living in the US)
I’m not against public funding of the BBC. It’s just that (according to the best figures I could dig up) team BBC estimates something like 97% of the population uses their services; but they have (completely separate from any part of the tax system) ~100 million£/year in collection costs and end up bringing some downright silly number of low-level criminal cases to cut evasion.
It would be ‘sleight of hand’ in the sense that the money still has to come from the people and go to the BBC; but it just strikes me as inefficient to treat a nearly-universal fee-for-service as something to be collected retail, rather than just treating it as a public expenditure.
The BBC is obviously bigger news; but it would be sort of like the US National Endowment for the Arts having a separate collections system, rather than just getting a cut from general funds.
Seems to me, if it was funded directly by taxes, then cutting its budget would be trivial even if not useful for the general public. Being funded by licenses seems to give it an extra layer of autonomy since you don’t have non BBC people deciding whether to spend taxes on a politicians pet project or another season of Sherlock.
Interestingly, they used to do this (I worked in retail and had to fill in the form more that once when a customer bought a tv-capable computer) but the practice was stopped a few years ago.
House of Cards is interesting though, I also noticed a lot of visible products when watching it. There’s actually a fair amount of analysis about the products and devices in House of Cards.
Netflix says there were zero paid product placements in the series. I see a lot of apple devices in that screenshot, but I’ve also seen Blackberry phones, Microsoft phones, and Samsung TVs on the show, which would be odd if they penned a product placement agreement with Apple.
Does that mean there’s a whole consumerist subtext running through the show that most people haven’t picked up on? Or just that the show producers decided they didn’t want to go the “product displacement” route, which always looks weird and distracting?
