Quote:
Originally Posted by rhyds
If they can afford to pay for a TV licence now, then they could afford to pay the subscription if they chose to. If your arguing that the subscription would be higher than the licence fee, then the only ones to suffer from the fall in revenue and subscriber numbers would be the BBC, who would be forced to either make more popular programmes or reduce the subscription cost to a more palatable level.
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The thing is, if you force the BBC to go entirely by the popularity of a programme, you are likely to end up with whole evenings of soaps and talent shows and little else at prime time.
Even now, if you watch Saturday night TV you would find it difficult to avoid talent shows.
While popular television and good television are not mutually exclusive, they are not the same thing. It's possible for a good programme to be popular and it's possible that a good programme is not popular. The same with bad programmes.
If you force every channel to be paid for by commercials or subscriptions, you will end up with a very American style TV market.. If you think this is a good thing, I'd wager you've never actually watched TV in America. I have. It's awful, and I speak as a fan of a *lot* of US TV shows. For every show like "The Wire", "The Sopranos", "Homeland" or "Family Guy" there are hundreds of second rate (or worse) comedies, dramas and soaps.. As for their news, every channel is unashamedly biased. At least ours pretend to be unbiased.