Chris

So, I’ve just had a little down time over breakfast to read Tim Davie’s speech in full. There is literally nothing in it at all that supports OB’s fanciful futurology.

Davie doesn’t even predict that the BBC will be IP only by 2030, nor that it wants to be. The date is a shorthand for ‘the next decade’. A fairly standard oratorical device. If the context wasn’t sufficient to demonstrate that, then there’s also the fact, already noted above, that the UK’s broadband landscape in 2030 is highly unlikely to support it. The BBC will go IP only at some point but no date is predicted. Makes you wonder what OB thinks he knows that the BBC Director General doesn’t.

Tim Davie predicts fewer linear channels for the BBC but not an end to them. In fact the persistence of some linear channels is an active part of the plan, not a compromise forced by technological limitations.

The BBC is not planning for a paywalled, subscription-only future, and nor is it warning especially loudly about that possibility. Davie makes the case for universality in his speech but it’s pretty obvious he thinks the benefits of universality are obvious enough that there’s no serious risk of the BBC losing it in the next charter settlement.

Lest we forget, OB’s original prediction was that the UK’s fairly imminent TV future was going to be entirely on the Netflix model, namely video on demand via the internet. That is absolutely not the future that the BBC is planning for. The BBC sees a need to continue providing linear schedules, even while moving its distribution method to IP - and that can’t occur as soon as the next 10 years, surprise surprise, for many of the reasons the rest of us laid out when this whole discussion started, something like 7 years and goodness knows how many threads ago.

Game, set and match. Thank you and goodnight.