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Morning ,

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-36308976

Well this is a step backwards for the BBC. I personally know a few people that really like this service and at a time when the government is wanting people to eat freshly cooked and nutritious food I can't help but think this is just narrow minded .

Why not cancel EastEnders and the other garbage they air on the BBC instead.
Just a suggestion .


TS
 TMM 17 May 2016
In reply to That Shallot:

No need to blame the BBC, try putting this one on Whittingdale's doorstep.

For the BBC to be 'distinctive' it needs to reduce some of its bloat particularly where it crosses over into commercial sectors outside TV and Radio.

The BBC website is an incredible resource but it has had a lot of commercial detractors as it is the default for so many of news, sports, entertainment, catch up services, live streams etc.

Thanks the Cons and the Tory press for this one.
2
 climbwhenready 17 May 2016
In reply to That Shallot:

I'm in 2 minds about this. On the one hand it's a useful resource. On the other hand, everything the BBC does edges out other companies. How would you start up an online recipe company when the government is funding your biggest competitor? It's hardly broadcasting.
 krikoman 17 May 2016
In reply to That Shallot:

I'd like to see the justification for 30 days, why does it cost more for longer?

How much do these chefs get for posting a recipe on line?


In reply to That Shallot:

Perhaps the NHS could take over the service, they could then weed out any recipes they thought were not healthy and nutritious.

Hopefully the service can be moved over to the BBC's commercial arm.
 Fredt 17 May 2016
In reply to That Shallot:

There may be a good answer to this, but I've always been puzzled as to why the children's channels (Cbeebies and CBBC) which were only available in the daytime, had to be on different channels to BBC3 and BBC4, which were only available in the evening and night?

Why couldn't they each share a channel?
 ChrisBrooke 17 May 2016
In reply to That Shallot:

Perhaps the BBC should start a climbing website. It would fall squarely within the Reithian precepts of informing (route info, crags databases, log books, destination articles etc), educating (how to guides, gear reviews etc) and entertaining (forums, photos, videos etc). They could do it with money from the licence fee and so wouldn't have to have adverts, banners, infotorials (or whatever the word is). It would be great.

UKC staff, what do you reckon? Fair game right?
2
 wintertree 17 May 2016
In reply to That Shallot:

They have somehow to fund the regular barrage of threatening letters to the growing number of people without need for a TV licence... The cost of that harassment must be up in the tens of millions of pounds a year.

They spend a good £5 of licence payer's money harassing "The Legal Occupier" at our house every year...
KevinD 17 May 2016
In reply to climbwhenready:

> How would you start up an online recipe company when the government is funding your biggest competitor?

The government doesnt.
Also there seem to be quite a few online recipe companies out there.
 Ramblin dave 17 May 2016
In reply to krikoman:

> I'd like to see the justification for 30 days, why does it cost more for longer?

AIUI it doesn't, or at least the cost is negligible - keeping them online indefinitely is essentially getting better value out of something that they've already paid for. The argument against it is entirely that it makes life harder for commercial content providers.
In reply to That Shallot:
The idea of closing it down to save money is bollocks. If you have a ton of good existing content which a lot of people access then you have an asset which should be making you money not a liability. The BBC are only losing money on the recipes website because they choose not to collect money.

Osborne showed just how thick he is about technology with his comment about the BBC becoming a newspaper rather than a broadcaster and something needing to be done. If it wants to survive the BBC can't be a broadcaster or a newspaper it needs to be an internet service because paper newspapers are nearly dead already and TV broadcasters are about to get killed.

Rather than kill the BBC off slowly by keeping the license fee and continually restricting its activities government should just privatise it and give it the freedom to compete.
Post edited at 11:56
 Tall Clare 17 May 2016
Never quite sure how useful these petitions are, but there's one to save the recipe archive here: https://www.change.org/p/bbc-save-the-bbc-s-recipe-archive

In reply to wintertree:

Yeah I agree on the harassment thing.

my father had a wreck of a house that was basically an unoccupied building site for about 20 years. Still letters came through the door from the TV licencing people and they were absolutely disgusting.

Just threat after threat of fines and legal action. The building didn’t even have an aerial… or a roof to put it on.
 Dauphin 17 May 2016
In reply to That Shallot:

Bloated remit, recipes website no? Make it independent, because as it stands it another quasi distended facet of U.K. gov or pare the whole thing back to essentials. Of course neither will happen. BBC is too valuable a brand and too valuable a propaganda tool for the state to disinvest itself from.

Ducking Masterchef, The Voice & Homes Under the Hammer. Gynocentric programming for the mentally enfeebled.

D
In reply to That Shallot:

A recipe for disaster and a disaster for recipes.
 Scarab9 17 May 2016
In reply to That Shallot:

personally I think being overhyped. There's the BBC Good Food site which is excellent and makes money from advertising so why is a separate one which is funded by the licence needed? It's essentially a duplicate and unnecessary site to maintain.

Also there IS a cost to keeping tens of thousands or more pages online and supporting the structure to do so.

Of course the Tory's are bastards and I'm sure there's more self serving reasons for them to do this as well (no that's not sarcasm)
 digby 17 May 2016
In reply to climbwhenready:

> everything the BBC does edges out other companies.

Proof? It's a doubtful proposition. It could equally be that it encourages other companies. And when it comes to original programme making, how many programmes does eg Dave make?
 digby 17 May 2016
In reply to ChrisBrooke:

> Perhaps the BBC should start a climbing website.

> UKC staff, what do you reckon? Fair game right?

If it did who's to know if it wouldn't make UKC more popular through greater reach and exposure?
 EddInaBox 17 May 2016
In reply to Fredt:

> There may be a good answer to this, but I've always been puzzled as to why the children's channels (Cbeebies and CBBC) which were only available in the daytime, had to be on different channels to BBC3 and BBC4, which were only available in the evening and night?

They do share the same space, or at least they did before BBC3 got taken off-air. In the old analogue days you tuned each channel on your T.V. to a different frequency, usually BBC1 on the first channel, BBC2 on the second, ITV on the third Channel 4 on the fourth, etc. when a channel shut down for the night, that space in the spectrum was idle. Then along came digital T.V. each frequency carries several channels, it's called multiplexing, your digital receiver tunes itself to the frequencies carrying broadcasts in your area, then splits off the individual channels. Along with the sound and video for multiple channels, each multiplex contains digital data to tell the receiver what it contains, including the name of each channel and which channel number to assign it to, when cbeebies goes goes off the air and BBC4 starts, the data carried by the multiplex tells your receiver to stop associating it with channel 121 and calling it cbeebies and associate it with channel 9 and call it BBC4.
 ChrisBrooke 17 May 2016
In reply to digby:

> If it did who's to know if it wouldn't make UKC more popular through greater reach and exposure?

Yes, who's to know? Or maybe it would become Myspace to the BBC's Facebook. That's the power of the free market.

Except of course it wouldn't be a free market where businesses are able to compete on equal terms, as one of the companies would actually be subsidised by a source of finance completely unrelated to its performance.
KevinD 17 May 2016
In reply to ChrisBrooke:

> Except of course it wouldn't be a free market where businesses are able to compete on equal terms, as one of the companies would actually be subsidised by a source of finance completely unrelated to its performance.

Does this extend to businesses supported by multinationals running them as loss leaders?
 ChrisBrooke 17 May 2016
In reply to KevinD:

Good point. I'd have thought companies can and do do whatever they like in that regard. It would be hard to regulate against 'loss leading' activities though. I'd have thought that although unpleasant, it's kind of fair game in business. The BBC isn't in business though (at least its non-business side isn't )
I'm writing as a massive supporter of the BBC, who pays for a licence even though I don't have to, because although I don't watch tv programmes, I value their news, radio and internet content. I just don't have a big problem with the BBC getting out of the free internet recipe game.
 digby 17 May 2016
In reply to ChrisBrooke:

> Except of course it wouldn't be a free market where businesses are able to compete on equal terms, as one of the companies would actually be subsidised by a source of finance completely unrelated to its performance.

If both are free access to the end user it makes no difference. Why should 'free enterprise' be sacred? If UKC is better than BBCUKC then it will do better, and if it's not then why should it survive anymore than if it were in competition with another site. Maybe a crowd funded one. Would you ban those too?

I pay for the BBC (partly!) and I'm very happy with what I get. I don't 'subsidise' the recipe site (or the rest of the BBC). I crowd fund it.
 ChrisBrooke 17 May 2016
In reply to digby:

> If both are free access to the end user it makes no difference.

It makes a difference to the end user in that one has advertising content on there, the other doesn't.

>Why should 'free enterprise' be sacred?

I don't think free enterprise is sacred, but in areas of non-essential public provision, like a climbing website for example, I think fair competition is the way to go. I think the more commercial areas the BBC enters into, with its massive resources, the worse it is for those genuinely trying to compete on merit in those areas.

> If UKC is better than BBCUKC then it will do better, and if it's not then why should it survive anymore than if it were in competition with another site.

Because the BBC isn't any other site. It's publicly funded. Would it be fair that some geezers with laptops and a server (sorry UKC folks, I know it's more complicated than that really) should compete with a website that has the weight, technological expertise, cross-platform advertising capabilities, of the publicly funded BBC, in the area of climbing news? Is there a public interest in the BBC getting involved in climbing? If the BBC used its resources to get into......shoe mending for example, set up a shop next door to every Timpsons on the high street, paid great wages to attract the finest cobblers, and provided the services for free, as long as you, or someone in your household, paid their tv licence......would that be fair to cobblers? It's providing a great public service, and it's paid for by 'crowd sourcing', the people love it and prefer it to Timpsons, after all it's high quality and free at the point of use, but is it right for the BBC to be doing that?

By using that ridiculous example I'm just trying to make the point that everything the BBC does, and does well, isn't necessarily fair in the open market. Just because it can provide high quality services in lots of areas, it doesn't mean that it should.


> Maybe a crowd funded one. Would you ban those too?

Not sure I advocated banning anything, but don't let that dry the froth at the corners of your mouth.

> I pay for the BBC (partly!) and I'm very happy with what I get. I don't 'subsidise' the recipe site (or the rest of the BBC). I crowd fund it.

Great choice of words. Crowd funding is the best way for people to directly fund the things they specifically and directly want to support. You choose the project, put your money that way, job done. That's not how the BBC licence fee works. You pay it and it goes wherever the BBC decides to put it. That's the only way it can work (for the moment at least) and is totally fair enough, but that doesn't mean how the BBC spends it is always right, and can't be up for debate. Much like the NHS. We all pay in to the pot and it gets spent in all sorts of ways, some of which we may agree with, some of which we may disagree with. In those cases it's fair to make the point that you disagree with the way the NHS spends its money. That doesn't mean trying to ban the NHS.

 munro90 17 May 2016
In reply to That Shallot:

Can't see the need to scrap it either.

Multitude of reasons:
(a) License fee money has already been spent on it, keeping them available increases value for money. (Ongoing costs are negligible in the context of the BBC's entire web presence)
(b) Corporate profits aren't an end to themselves. There is no inherent virtue in allowing somebody to make money off something.
(c) There is significant virtue in providing a free resource of inspiration for healthy and tasty food in a world where the skills to cook it are all to often lost between generations.
(d) Free market capitalism's value is notionally in generating human good by raising the standard of living through innovation driven by competition. State organisations are usually caricatured as incompetent and clumsy. If companies can't be innovative enough to compete with the staid old BBC, then that is their problem.

In summary, maybe I'm a dumb utilitarian but there is so little benefit to be gained and such a significant loss to the vast majority of human beings from scrapping it; the case for retention is self-evident.
 Big Ger 17 May 2016
In reply to TMM:

> Thanks the Cons and the Tory press for this one.

Someone had to, obvs.

 Big Ger 17 May 2016
In reply to That Shallot:


> I can't help but think this is just narrow minded .

> Why not cancel EastEnders and the other garbage they air on the BBC instead.

The irony is strong in this one.


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