Get rid of the licence fee!

Not much point in commenting on this post really, the point is made in a most eloquent manner and requires no improvement on our part.

Video on Demand gets in gear, but only in the USA

Things are always better in America; well apart from grammar, cheese, gun crime......oh never mind. Anyway the point is that video on demand is starting to have a noticable impact in the USA.

According to this story the takeup of pay TV in the USA is dropping and one of the reasons is that people can get stuff for free over the internet. What the story does not really spell out is that people are prepared to pay to use sites like Netflix (which presumably do not count as 'Pay TV'). Whether free or not the point is that people prefer to select what they view and when it starts. Suffering brain death while consuming the output of certain channels is not really healthy at all.

Apple have also noticed this trend and are supposedly about to revamp Apple TV. Whether this will go anywhere is debatable. The death of Apple TV has long been predicted by the pundits. As usual the service will not be available in the UK.

We have observed before that a major stumbling block in the UK is the grip that the major channels have on copyright rights. This is what stopped Hulu launching a service here. A way round this obstacle needs to be found.

Web only drama arrives

Obviously there are lots of things that are available on the Web only. To be honest this is because many of them are so bad that even by the lax standards of today no 'proper' TV channel will consider giving them air time.

It may be a first however that MTV which is available on cable, satellite (and possibly digital?) is piloting a series as web only. This clearly shows where things are headed. The major issue with web TV nowadays, is not the technology, but the availability of content. Clearly MTV see an opportunity in filling the gap.

Douglas finds a new target

We have linked to Douglas Carswells excellent blog before. It is good to see that he is stepping up his targetting of the TV Licence. See this recent post for example. Douglas has a good record for getting rid of things, notably he claimed the scalp of the last speaker. Lets hope this goes somewhere.

The injustice of the TV Licence

We promised more from David Grahams ASI report on the Licence Fee. The following passage is quoted verbatim. Eat your hearts out all you unreconstructed capitalists, no one delights in grinding the faces of the working poor quite as efficiently as TV Licensing.

Nor do most people see the darker side of the payment process. The Licence Fee is chargeable to any household that receives a live broadcast, whether that is a BBC signal or not. Failure to pay results in prosecution. In 2008/09 there were 168,000 prosecutions for evasion, nearly 15% of all prosecutions. Most of those charged are poor, often young single mothers. The only way you can avoid this payment is by watching no live TV, literally having your set disabled.

Here is a magistrate giving her own views of this system: "As a JP, I have for 20 years had the difficult task of sentencing TV licence defaulters, followed some months later by the often hopeless task of fine enforcement. Unlike other offenders, TV licence evaders are predominantly female, many of them benefit recipients with children. The majority are single, struggling to keep their families financially afloat. Food and electricity tokens often take priority over a weekly TV licence payment. If still without a licence, offenders can be re-prosecuted almost immediately unless they dispose of their TVs."

The fact that the Licence Fee criminalises poor people has been the main ground of dissent from public figures like Charles Moore, or Geoff Mulgan, a former advisor to the Labour Government, who said: "The Licence Fee alone stands as an inegalitarian flat-rate charge, linked in no way to ability to pay. (It is a tax) which has no democratic component: it lends no choices to those who pay and conveys no information to the broadcaster".

Canvas could still be blanked!

Virgin Media are launching a complaint to OFCOM about Project Canvas. If succesful this might still see Canvas stopped.

We are impressed that the complaint is based around the point that Project Canvas has not promoted open standards. This is a useful line of attack, as it gets to the root of the BBC's interest in Canvas.

To quote from a footnote in David Grahams report for the Adam Smith Institute:

This may be behind the BBC’s desire to promote "hybrid" devices like Canvas. At a recent conference, a BBC executive, Richard Halton, said that Canvas, a hybrid device that combines access to the internet and to broadcast channels, required the payment of a BBC Licence Fee because it was capable of receiving a live transmission. www.marketforce.eu.com/broadcasting

Clearly the BBC does not want open standards in place otherwise you could just use a Google TV box to access SeeSaw (for example) and not bother with a TV Licence.

Wealth of the Nations Viewers

The Adam Smith Institute has released this report saying that the licence fee should be abolished and that the BBC should become a subscription service. We could not agree more.

Here are some quotes from the report:

• The UK’s current model for broadcast regulation is exhausted.
• Universal broadband and the Internet make a "licence" to broadcast obsolete.
• However, the BBC remains committed to its subsidy status. It invests heavily in opinion management and has systematically captured its regulators.
• This report proposes voluntary subscription as an alternative funding model.

This is an excellent report and I shall be systematically cherry picking from it for the next few days.