I see the TV Licence has gone up another £3 per annum...

RE: Rights may be free, but .....

Maybe so that the BBC should put money toward the blue ribbon sports - trouble with that is the cost, and sport is dead money for them. Commercial stations can sell advertising on the back of top events, BBC can't - if BBC produce drama they can sell that on.

In searching for news of BBC taking up MLB rights - not found anything other than it looks like Five won't be continuing, I saw an article from a cricket website criticising the BBC for spending £250m on Formula 1 and then saying they could have bought 2 Twenty20 internationals a year for that! So 2 cricket matches versus however many F1 Grand Prix a season.

 

RE: Rights may be free, but .....

The BBC is not a commercial organisation, it is not there to make money. There are no shareholders who get a dividend. It is a service - a public service - in the old days it was the original model for PBS. Now it's run very, very badly at all levels ( not just sport ) If it wants to compete in sport it should compete, whether there are sell ons or not. The baseball ( whether true or tabloid tale ) is just another example of bad decision making at a high level. Great for baseball fans - all 20,000 of them, but not good for the pensioners paying their tv licenses!

 

however

if the BBC bid for football matches then great they'd be on the bbc, if the BBC didn't bid for them then they'd be on another channel. Either way the public gets to see it either with or without spending hundreds of millions of our money. Baseball for example however might not be on TV if the BBC chose not to show it so when you look at it like that which is the more valuable service? Something that would be on another channel anyway? Or something that wouldn't be on?

In my opinion the bbc should only be allowed to bid for programs etc if there are no other bids from other terrestrial channels. This would be on the condition that a bid from another channel was to provide a service of the same level that the BBC was bidding to show.
Get the BBC showing things that we can't see on all the other channels, get them making their own programs and lets see a bit of variety on TV instead of them just trying to get the ratings all the time and going after one kind of program.

At the moment I watch 2 hours of programming per week on the BBC, I watch more on ITV, channel 4 and five individually than I do on all of the BBC channels combined because it shows no variety.

 

The BBC suffers because...

it has been forced to behave like a commercial orgainisation in that it is judged on ratings rather than the quality and variety of it's output.

For what it's worth, the Beeb's sport coverage is usually only matched by Sky.

 

You're not wrong

The adverts here in Oz are a reyt pain in the arse. I'd happily pay a license fee. There is an advert break about 30 seconds before the programme end titles come up. What's the point in that?

 

Nope still cannot see how they can justify it.

 

Are you in Kath & Kim country or is it drunk natives lolling around everywhere? nt