Quote:
Originally Posted by CaptJamieHunter
Just a quick thought as I pass through this evening...
Doesn't the BBC's Charter say something about the BBC not showing adverts? Not that that has stopped them from plugging Eastenders (*hurl*) on their radio stations.
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BBC Enterprises are allowed to show adverts to non-licence payers as a means of bolstering funding - for this purpose they assume that all UK-resident websurfers are licencepayers and all non-UK surfers are not.
Sadly, I think the latest incarnation of the BBC Charter allows advertising to be pushed at all non-licence payers (they justified it as "helping to keep UK licence payers fees down") and given that they've allowed this mission-creep, they're also likely to be okay with profiling of UK users for the purposes of targeted advertising on sites visited other than
www.bbc.co.uk
My personal opinion: Roll-on all-digital TV, when they can do-away with the licence fee and charge those people who actually watch BBC (I'm one) by means of direct subscription, hence continuing the brilliant tradition of advertisment-free, high-quality television in this country.
Come to think of it - I think this is Kent Ertugrul's biggest miscalculation in the whole sorry Phorm affair: He assumed that UK citizens are, in consumer terms, the same as US citizens. What he failed to realise is that, unlike our US cousins, we have a great tradition of high-quality, advertisment-free media content which is funded effectively by subscription (OK - licence fee, but hopefully subscription in the future), This contradicts his business' premise that content services cannot survive without advertising (and therefore Phorm is a necessary evil), so he choses to ignore this inconvenient example of how good the internet could be.