Friday, February 27, 2009

Free TV

Dear Stan,

I have recently seen reports that most of the major US newspapers are in terminal crisis or near-terminal crisis. The "Rocky Mountain News" in Denver is closing, the venerable (1865) "San Francisco Chronicle" is slashing jobs in what looks like its death spasms, the "New York Times" is losing tens of millions a year, the corporation which runs the "LA Times" and the "Chicago Tribune" has filed for bankruptcy....and can these titles survive much longer in their own right?

Part of the problem has been falling circulation caused by, er, giving the stuff away for free on their Web sites. Why should anyone in their home cities pay for these papers when anyone on the planet with an Internet connection can read them for nothing?

Is the BBC committing similar slow motion suicide? Apart from enraging people like me, who ought to be its core supporters, with garbage programs, abortion propaganda and eyewatering salaries for people of questionable ability, it has been giving its material away for months on the iplayer service - check it out on www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer. You can watch very recent BBC programs shortly after they are broadcast live to UK audiences, plus truckloads of other material such as David Attenborough's natural history documentaries.

I noted in earlier blogs that the BBC extorts $200 from every TV-watching household in the country, regardless of whether they watch BBC or not. I say "extort" because there is a consensus across all the political parties that the BBC licence fee should remain untouched, so there is no constitutional way of resisting it. Turkeys don't vote for Christmas and politicians aren't going to offend a major media player.

But you need a TV licence only for "live broadcast" material. As the iplayer content is not transmitted in "real time", you don't need a TV licence to view it. Well, seeing that everyone on the planet with a broadband connection can view it for free anyway, it would be doubly iniquitous to force a fee on British iplayer viewers.

So far the only way you could avoid the TV licence was by being over 75 or by living on those dodgy housing estates in Northern Ireland where the local Catholic or Protestant ganglords would break the legs of any TV licence enforcer. The obvious downside was that they would also break your legs if you offended them. Now that you can use iplayer to watch BBC for nothing, how much longer can it survive?