I hope all those who think the BBC is overpriced are not paying for Sky.
PSB is still importat today. Do you really want a channel full of nothing but reality shows and stuff purchased from America. News and doncumentatries are what the BBC do best, but they also have to be internationally commercially viable as well. They are really going to suffer when the licence fee has to also cover the world service.
They are viable and they make more than enough money worldwide to continue being made. PSB is irrelevant today, especially in an age of digital technology and access to it. The license fee is a self serving anachronistic left over that should be consigned to history. Bring on the adverts.
Surely access to digital technology - which isn't as universal as you believe by the way - does not mean that quality programmes will be made? Equally I don't see why I should pay more for a Mars Bar so they can support X Factor. I know you will say "you don't have to buy the Mars Bar", but if I really want a Mars Bar I don't have the choice to buy one that isn't supporting awful tele, do I? And of course a lot of people, like myself, prefer programmes to be ad free.
The BBC is one of the best things this country has going for it.
I agree, AND care needs to be taken that is remains a fantastic institution .. standards in both personnel and content have gradually deteriorated in certain services in an attempt to get more 'street and down with the kids and trendies' .. such posturing should be left to the commercial media.
The BBC is one of the best things this country has going for it.
I agree, AND care needs to be taken that is remains a fantastic institution .. standards in both personnel and content have gradually deteriorated in certain services in an attempt to get more 'street and down with the kids and trendies' .. such posturing should be left to the commercial media.
10 years late for that sentiment Lincs..
The National Lottery Draw Live? ..I don't think so.
Poor people subsidising the opera is one thing but please don't put it on public service telly at my expense.
for me the glass is 1/2 full. Radio 5 is going to the dogs, Radio 3 and 4 are getting better, BBC TV 1 is too 'commercial' TV 3 and 2 and 4 are generally excellent, the website is terrific. the BBC needs 'sorting out' politically, but there is no need to throw the baby out with the proverbial bathwater
I was reading an excellent article on the history of ITV last night....was fascinating to remember that as recently as 10 years ago they were showing diverse programming such as The South Bank Show and Survivor.
I think the BBC could cut back on the quantity and concentrate on the quality. Also they seem to duplicate staff, i.e. they will have a BBC tv and a BBC radio reporter at the same game, they could make savings which wouldn't impair the service.
The BBC is absolutely superb, the best public service broadcaster in the world without a shadow of a doubt and something that Britons should be incredibly proud of.
I attend lots of broadcast/media conventions and conferences all over the world as part of my work and the admiration for BBC content is universal, people admire (and buy) its content from its brilliant drama right through to its unparallelled nature programming.
People who hate the BBC are normally driving a political agenda - like dear old Uncle Rupert - and as is mentioned above the most senior political voice at the BBC is a Tory, as is the Chairman, that well known marxist Chris Patten.
One of their most high-profile politics show is presented by another Tory, Andrew Neil, and has yet another Tory as its main panelits, Michael Portillo and as others have said you can hardly call the likes of Jonathan Dimbleby or Jeremy Paxman Labourites.
Politicians always accuse the BBC of bias, its part of the political game, the Tories hated the BBC in the 1980's/90's and then Labour and Alistair Campbell were at war with them from 2003 onwards, right through to the 2010 election campaign, triggered by Andrew Gilligan and his reporting on David Kelley.
Seriously, how can people complain about paying 145 quid per year, less than 3 quid per week, to get access to all that TV and Radio content (not to mention the brilliant website)?
How much do Sky charge for their service? A minimum of 264 quid per year for their basic Entertainment package - a large chunk of which is re-heated American trash, and about 720 quid per year if you want the whole lot.
Christ, if you want to get rid of the BBC then first come and see how crap TV is in Australia, where the ABC is hopelessly under-funded so TV is dominated by three commercial networks which show nothing but cheap reality or talent shows or dire US imports, you could say exactly the same for the US where most of the top notch content comes from the studios, not the networks.
I have not watched anything on a commercial network here for as long as I can remember, if the BBC went you would miss it enormously.
I think the BBC could cut back on the quantity and concentrate on the quality. Also they seem to duplicate staff, i.e. they will have a BBC tv and a BBC radio reporter at the same game, they could make savings which wouldn't impair the service.
I know that sounds good in theory but from a practical point of view that's impossible to pull off, radio and TV are very different mediums and require different people with different skill sets. Do you really want to see Alan Green on TV?
Not arguing about the quality they rarely produce now. They should concentrate on that, cut down on the rest of the crap that everyone else seems to do so much better according to some. And it should be subscription, where as at the moment it is compulsory. I begrudge £3 a week at the moment yes, especially because I have not got the choice to opt out. And your argument about political agendas can equally be pointed in the direction of those who pipe up to support it without consideration for its many organisational failings.
Not arguing about the quality they rarely produce now. They should concentrate on that, cut down on the rest of the crap that everyone else seems to do so much better according to some. And it should be subscription, where as at the moment it is compulsory. I begrudge £3 a week at the moment yes, especially because I have not got the choice to opt out. And your argument about political agendas can equally be pointed in the direction of those who pipe up to support it without consideration for its many organisational failings.
The problem is that what you call 'crap' is what other people call 'quality' and vice-versa, being a public service broadcaster is tough because you have to cater to an extremely wide audience, you can't please everyone.
I am sure that the BBC has plenty of organisational failings, that would put them pretty much on a par with Mr. Murdoch's lot and their plethora of phone-hackers, wouldn't it? That's the phone hackers that James and Rupert knew nothing about as they were securing exclusive after exclusive for the NoTW on a weekly basis.
As for the subscription argument, under current technology of digital terrestrial broadcasting this is not really possible to do, its not impossible but if you look back at the ONDigital disaster you realise that encrypting DTT so you can go to a 'subscription' model would be very, very hard to do, DTT is designed for free-to-air rather than pay TV.
In the future, if content is able to be delivered over broadband networks on a live-streaming basis then on a universal footing then you could more feasibly move towards a subscription basis, we might move towards this but its a long way off.
Under current technology restrictions moving to a subscription basis would be unworkable, how could you prevent people like you from opting out of paying for the BBC but then deciding you want to watch Match of the Day anyway as a free loader? The whole network would collapse because people would choose not to pay but watch it anyway.
The BBC is brilliant overall. As an expat, I can assure you you'd miss it if it was gone.
Come on..no-one overseas can get any BBC video content even if they are still license fee payers which in my view is another BBC rip off.
You can get BBC radio shows through the iPlayer (excluding live sports braodcasts as there are usually rights issues) and BBC podcasts. You can't get TV (well you can but not in a completely above board manner), but that again is a rights issue and the same is true for content from Channel 4, ITV, Sky etc etc etc. It's a media industry rip-off, not just something the BBC does.
Not arguing about the quality they rarely produce now. They should concentrate on that, cut down on the rest of the crap that everyone else seems to do so much better according to some. And it should be subscription, where as at the moment it is compulsory. I begrudge £3 a week at the moment yes, especially because I have not got the choice to opt out. And your argument about political agendas can equally be pointed in the direction of those who pipe up to support it without consideration for its many organisational failings.
The problem is that what you call 'crap' is what other people call 'quality' and vice-versa, being a public service broadcaster is tough because you have to cater to an extremely wide audience, you can't please everyone.
I am sure that the BBC has plenty of organisational failings, that would put them pretty much on a par with Mr. Murdoch's lot and their plethora of phone-hackers, wouldn't it? That's the phone hackers that James and Rupert knew nothing about as they were securing exclusive after exclusive for the NoTW on a weekly basis.
As for the subscription argument, under current technology of digital terrestrial broadcasting this is not really possible to do, its not impossible but if you look back at the ONDigital disaster you realise that encrypting DTT so you can go to a 'subscription' model would be very, very hard to do, DTT is designed for free-to-air rather than pay TV.
In the future, if content is able to be delivered over broadband networks on a live-streaming basis then on a universal footing then you could more feasibly move towards a subscription basis, we might move towards this but its a long way off.
Under current technology restrictions moving to a subscription basis would be unworkable, how could you prevent people like you from opting out of paying for the BBC but then deciding you want to watch Match of the Day anyway as a free loader? The whole network would collapse because people would choose not to pay but watch it anyway.
I don't do Sky, it is my choice, I don't watch BBC but I have to pay £3 or the bailiffs will be around. Technology, very very soon will make all your posturings irrelevant, then the BBC in it's current format will go. Hold on, that is me assuming that we will ever have a government with bollocks, of any colour !
I think the BBC could cut back on the quantity and concentrate on the quality. Also they seem to duplicate staff, i.e. they will have a BBC tv and a BBC radio reporter at the same game, they could make savings which wouldn't impair the service.
I know that sounds good in theory but from a practical point of view that's impossible to pull off, radio and TV are very different mediums and require different people with different skill sets. Do you really want to see Alan Green on TV?
Definitely not. I don't want him on the radio either ;-)
I love the BBC but I could happily live the rest of my life without the need to hear Green's sanctimonious whinging.
I don't do Sky, it is my choice, I don't watch BBC but I have to pay £3 or the bailiffs will be around. Technology, very very soon will make all your posturings irrelevant, then the BBC in it's current format will go. Hold on, that is me assuming that we will ever have a government with bollocks, of any colour !
In what way will technology "make all your posturings irrelevant" - how is that going to happen?
Television is going to be delivered terrestrially for a long, long time to come and there is no reliable way to deliver subscription-based television at the moment via terrestrial, so a subscription model cannot be implemented.
Besides, if you did want to implement a subscription model based on DTT then that would mean everyone who did want to pay to watch the BBC - including low-income pensioners, the unemployed etc. - would have to fork out for a settop box that had conditional access technology, they don't come for free.
The only way to implement it would be to have it on an 'honesty' basis and that's never going to work, is it? There are people on here who proudly tell everyone about how they never pay to use the trains, would you trust them to pay to use the BBC?
You can download BBC content over the Internet but to transfer all current live channel broadcasts to the Internet - where you could actually implement a user-pays model - cannot be done because there is simply not enough bandwidth available to do it, especially in rural and remote areas.
I think the BBC could cut back on the quantity and concentrate on the quality. Also they seem to duplicate staff, i.e. they will have a BBC tv and a BBC radio reporter at the same game, they could make savings which wouldn't impair the service.
I know that sounds good in theory but from a practical point of view that's impossible to pull off, radio and TV are very different mediums and require different people with different skill sets. Do you really want to see Alan Green on TV?
Definitely not. I don't want him on the radio either ;-)
I love the BBC but I could happily live the rest of my life without the need to hear Green's sanctimonious whinging.
I've stopped listening to radio 5 live thanks to that idiot.
Its not perfect but for me the pro's still outweigh the cons. Theres a number of things I enjoy that I doubt anyone else would produce if they weren't there. I was in the US recently, take away the sports coverage and what was left on the 450000 channels or whatever it was, was utterly dismal.
However, confusing us with P*****......... Well, goonerhater has a point
I've seen tv abroad (US, Oz, Spain a bit) and it's pretty awful. First time I went to the US there were hundreds of channels. I was stuck in a hotel room in town where I didn't know anyone and couldn't find anything I wanted to watch. I mainly watch BBC but TBH can take or leave it a lot of the time. I find it biased to the right politically, but that's probably just me. I get really hacked off with a lot of the political/comment stuff, particularly when it makes assumptions about people. Like when Newsnight interviewed a single mum on benefits and pretended she was jobless and tried to paint her as a scrounger, when she actually was working part time and was on benefit because her pay was low. And I really don't like the amount of money they give to those idiots on MOTD. And my other half has Radio 4 on all the time and that's really infuriating. But on balance, I don't want it to go, despite all the scandals and the money they waste. It's catering for a very wide range of people, all over the country, and with the best will in the world no one is going to like a majority of it. They sell programmes all over the world, and the knock on employs lots of people here. For all the talk of Britain making things again, the fact is we do make things in this country - and TV programmes are one of the successes.
I've seen tv abroad (US, Oz, Spain a bit) and it's pretty awful. First time I went to the US there were hundreds of channels. I was stuck in a hotel room in town where I didn't know anyone and couldn't find anything I wanted to watch. I mainly watch BBC but TBH can take or leave it a lot of the time. I find it biased to the right politically, but that's probably just me. I get really hacked off with a lot of the political/comment stuff, particularly when it makes assumptions about people. Like when Newsnight interviewed a single mum on benefits and pretended she was jobless and tried to paint her as a scrounger, when she actually was working part time and was on benefit because her pay was low. And I really don't like the amount of money they give to those idiots on MOTD. And my other half has Radio 4 on all the time and that's really infuriating. But on balance, I don't want it to go, despite all the scandals and the money they waste. It's catering for a very wide range of people, all over the country, and with the best will in the world no one is going to like a majority of it. They sell programmes all over the world, and the knock on employs lots of people here. For all the talk of Britain making things again, the fact is we do make things in this country - and TV programmes are one of the successes.
You make some excellent points in that last paragraph, many of the programs that the BBC make would not get made by private broadcasters because they don't appeal to the mass-market.
I don't do Sky, it is my choice, I don't watch BBC but I have to pay £3 or the bailiffs will be around. Technology, very very soon will make all your posturings irrelevant, then the BBC in it's current format will go. Hold on, that is me assuming that we will ever have a government with bollocks, of any colour !
In what way will technology "make all your posturings irrelevant" - how is that going to happen?
Television is going to be delivered terrestrially for a long, long time to come and there is no reliable way to deliver subscription-based television at the moment via terrestrial, so a subscription model cannot be implemented.
Besides, if you did want to implement a subscription model based on DTT then that would mean everyone who did want to pay to watch the BBC - including low-income pensioners, the unemployed etc. - would have to fork out for a settop box that had conditional access technology, they don't come for free.
The only way to implement it would be to have it on an 'honesty' basis and that's never going to work, is it? There are people on here who proudly tell everyone about how they never pay to use the trains, would you trust them to pay to use the BBC?
You can download BBC content over the Internet but to transfer all current live channel broadcasts to the Internet - where you could actually implement a user-pays model - cannot be done because there is simply not enough bandwidth available to do it, especially in rural and remote areas.
No one will have a TV in their house within 10 years maybe even less. We can only imagine what medium it will be delivered over, without a crystal ball (hey, maybe it will be a crystal ball!), technology is shifting so fast. Whatever media future programming, whoever delivers it, is delivered on the whole concept of a mandatory license is arcane and will not survive. Who would of thought even 5 years ago that so much free information (to the user) would be delivered in such quantity and so cheaply to the public via broadband. The BBC will have to change to survive this, the license remember is calculated on the fact that you have a television receiver in your house. If this does not exist, what are you taxing, nothing? Institutions like the BBC, IF they survive will have to get their revenue from, subscription (in whatever way this may be enforced) or by advertising like everything else does today and will do in the future.
No one will have a TV in their house within 10 years maybe even less. We can only imagine what medium it will be delivered over, without a crystal ball (hey, maybe it will be a crystal ball!), technology is shifting so fast. Whatever media future programming, whoever delivers it, is delivered on the whole concept of a mandatory license is arcane and will not survive. Who would of thought even 5 years ago that so much free information (to the user) would be delivered in such quantity and so cheaply to the public via broadband. The BBC will have to change to survive this, the license remember is calculated on the fact that you have a television receiver in your house. If this does not exist, what are you taxing, nothing? Institutions like the BBC, IF they survive will have to get their revenue from, subscription (in whatever way this may be enforced) or by advertising like everything else does today and will do in the future.
No one will have a TV in their house within 10 years maybe even less. We can only imagine what medium it will be delivered over, without a crystal ball (hey, maybe it will be a crystal ball!), technology is shifting so fast. Whatever media future programming, whoever delivers it, is delivered on the whole concept of a mandatory license is arcane and will not survive. Who would of thought even 5 years ago that so much free information (to the user) would be delivered in such quantity and so cheaply to the public via broadband. The BBC will have to change to survive this, the license remember is calculated on the fact that you have a television receiver in your house. If this does not exist, what are you taxing, nothing? Institutions like the BBC, IF they survive will have to get their revenue from, subscription (in whatever way this may be enforced) or by advertising like everything else does today and will do in the future.
That is a very, very bold claim. I work in the TV/telecoms industry and the trend you are talking about is 'convergence' that is the trend for content to be delivered not just to TV sets but also to PC's, Tablets, Smartphones etc.
The BBC is already addressing this market with products like BBC iPlayer - the most popular and successful 'catch-up TV' service anywhere in the world, BBC executives get swamped with requests from other broadcasters to tell them how they launched it so well.
Whilst its true that more and more people will consume content over various handheld devices the idea that the traditional TV will be replaced is going way, way too far, in fact the sales of TV sets continue to rise as advanced models get cheaper and people have multiple TV's in their homes, you can now buy huge HD TV's for about 150 quid!
You are right that you can download BBC content (for free) to these non-TV devices, but you cannot download every type of content, live broadcasting (of sports etc) cannot be done over the Internet at present (not in UK that is) because there is not enough bandwidth to do so.
If people want to watch live TV events - and they obviously do for sports and special occasions like the Queen's Jubilee this year - then you have to deliver that via terrestrial broadcasting (or have everyone install a satellite dish and get a STB which is not always possible) - and enforcing a subscription-based service delivered via terrestrial TV is very hard and expensive to do.
I agree that the mandatory license fee does seem anachronistic but in the case of the BBC then - as long as people want broadcast TV - there is no other viable model available.
Another reason that the traditional TV market will stay around for a long while to come is that it is the fulcrum of the advertising market, if you move all content to downloads/streaming the advertising market would collapse because advertisers don't trust the 'new media' market in the same way they trust the TV market.
The advertisers can get 'hard data' on who is watching what and at what time on 'traditional TV' through the AC Nielsen (or whomever) viewing panels, this enables them to make informed choices as to where they should spend their money - they have very little visibility on the Internet and so cling to TV.
Comments
The World Service (TV) has adverts.
Full of tree huging,Guaridianistas should be burnt !
Only place i have ever seen a glory hole was in the main BBC bulding -------says it all.
Cant even get BBC news not that there is ever any journalism goes into that anyway.
Much revered by middle-class establishment England but way past its sell by date I'm afraid and another very unfair UK tax to fund it.
The National Lottery Draw Live? ..I don't think so.
Poor people subsidising the opera is one thing but please don't put it on public service telly at my expense.
I attend lots of broadcast/media conventions and conferences all over the world as part of my work and the admiration for BBC content is universal, people admire (and buy) its content from its brilliant drama right through to its unparallelled nature programming.
People who hate the BBC are normally driving a political agenda - like dear old Uncle Rupert - and as is mentioned above the most senior political voice at the BBC is a Tory, as is the Chairman, that well known marxist Chris Patten.
One of their most high-profile politics show is presented by another Tory, Andrew Neil, and has yet another Tory as its main panelits, Michael Portillo and as others have said you can hardly call the likes of Jonathan Dimbleby or Jeremy Paxman Labourites.
Politicians always accuse the BBC of bias, its part of the political game, the Tories hated the BBC in the 1980's/90's and then Labour and Alistair Campbell were at war with them from 2003 onwards, right through to the 2010 election campaign, triggered by Andrew Gilligan and his reporting on David Kelley.
Seriously, how can people complain about paying 145 quid per year, less than 3 quid per week, to get access to all that TV and Radio content (not to mention the brilliant website)?
How much do Sky charge for their service? A minimum of 264 quid per year for their basic Entertainment package - a large chunk of which is re-heated American trash, and about 720 quid per year if you want the whole lot.
Christ, if you want to get rid of the BBC then first come and see how crap TV is in Australia, where the ABC is hopelessly under-funded so TV is dominated by three commercial networks which show nothing but cheap reality or talent shows or dire US imports, you could say exactly the same for the US where most of the top notch content comes from the studios, not the networks.
I have not watched anything on a commercial network here for as long as I can remember, if the BBC went you would miss it enormously.
I am sure that the BBC has plenty of organisational failings, that would put them pretty much on a par with Mr. Murdoch's lot and their plethora of phone-hackers, wouldn't it? That's the phone hackers that James and Rupert knew nothing about as they were securing exclusive after exclusive for the NoTW on a weekly basis.
As for the subscription argument, under current technology of digital terrestrial broadcasting this is not really possible to do, its not impossible but if you look back at the ONDigital disaster you realise that encrypting DTT so you can go to a 'subscription' model would be very, very hard to do, DTT is designed for free-to-air rather than pay TV.
In the future, if content is able to be delivered over broadband networks on a live-streaming basis then on a universal footing then you could more feasibly move towards a subscription basis, we might move towards this but its a long way off.
Under current technology restrictions moving to a subscription basis would be unworkable, how could you prevent people like you from opting out of paying for the BBC but then deciding you want to watch Match of the Day anyway as a free loader? The whole network would collapse because people would choose not to pay but watch it anyway.
I love the BBC but I could happily live the rest of my life without the need to hear Green's sanctimonious whinging.
burn the place down shoot all the right on "free press" --as long as its our way of thinking that is"free press"
Turn the ashes into bog paper so all right thinking people can wipe the arses with it.
In what way will technology "make all your posturings irrelevant" - how is that going to happen?
Television is going to be delivered terrestrially for a long, long time to come and there is no reliable way to deliver subscription-based television at the moment via terrestrial, so a subscription model cannot be implemented.
Besides, if you did want to implement a subscription model based on DTT then that would mean everyone who did want to pay to watch the BBC - including low-income pensioners, the unemployed etc. - would have to fork out for a settop box that had conditional access technology, they don't come for free.
The only way to implement it would be to have it on an 'honesty' basis and that's never going to work, is it? There are people on here who proudly tell everyone about how they never pay to use the trains, would you trust them to pay to use the BBC?
You can download BBC content over the Internet but to transfer all current live channel broadcasts to the Internet - where you could actually implement a user-pays model - cannot be done because there is simply not enough bandwidth available to do it, especially in rural and remote areas.
However, confusing us with P*****......... Well, goonerhater has a point
I mainly watch BBC but TBH can take or leave it a lot of the time. I find it biased to the right politically, but that's probably just me. I get really hacked off with a lot of the political/comment stuff, particularly when it makes assumptions about people. Like when Newsnight interviewed a single mum on benefits and pretended she was jobless and tried to paint her as a scrounger, when she actually was working part time and was on benefit because her pay was low.
And I really don't like the amount of money they give to those idiots on MOTD. And my other half has Radio 4 on all the time and that's really infuriating.
But on balance, I don't want it to go, despite all the scandals and the money they waste. It's catering for a very wide range of people, all over the country, and with the best will in the world no one is going to like a majority of it. They sell programmes all over the world, and the knock on employs lots of people here. For all the talk of Britain making things again, the fact is we do make things in this country - and TV programmes are one of the successes.
Television is going to be delivered terrestrially for a long, long time to come and there is no reliable way to deliver subscription-based television at the moment via terrestrial, so a subscription model cannot be implemented.
Besides, if you did want to implement a subscription model based on DTT then that would mean everyone who did want to pay to watch the BBC - including low-income pensioners, the unemployed etc. - would have to fork out for a settop box that had conditional access technology, they don't come for free.
The only way to implement it would be to have it on an 'honesty' basis and that's never going to work, is it? There are people on here who proudly tell everyone about how they never pay to use the trains, would you trust them to pay to use the BBC?
You can download BBC content over the Internet but to transfer all current live channel broadcasts to the Internet - where you could actually implement a user-pays model - cannot be done because there is simply not enough bandwidth available to do it, especially in rural and remote areas.
No one will have a TV in their house within 10 years maybe even less. We can only imagine what medium it will be delivered over, without a crystal ball (hey, maybe it will be a crystal ball!), technology is shifting so fast. Whatever media future programming, whoever delivers it, is delivered on the whole concept of a mandatory license is arcane and will not survive. Who would of thought even 5 years ago that so much free information (to the user) would be delivered in such quantity and so cheaply to the public via broadband. The BBC will have to change to survive this, the license remember is calculated on the fact that you have a television receiver in your house. If this does not exist, what are you taxing, nothing? Institutions like the BBC, IF they survive will have to get their revenue from, subscription (in whatever way this may be enforced) or by advertising like everything else does today and will do in the future.
CL has managed to merge my post with yours...
No one will have a TV in their house within 10 years maybe even less. We can only imagine what medium it will be delivered over, without a crystal ball (hey, maybe it will be a crystal ball!), technology is shifting so fast. Whatever media future programming, whoever delivers it, is delivered on the whole concept of a mandatory license is arcane and will not survive. Who would of thought even 5 years ago that so much free information (to the user) would be delivered in such quantity and so cheaply to the public via broadband. The BBC will have to change to survive this, the license remember is calculated on the fact that you have a television receiver in your house. If this does not exist, what are you taxing, nothing? Institutions like the BBC, IF they survive will have to get their revenue from, subscription (in whatever way this may be enforced) or by advertising like everything else does today and will do in the future.
The BBC is already addressing this market with products like BBC iPlayer - the most popular and successful 'catch-up TV' service anywhere in the world, BBC executives get swamped with requests from other broadcasters to tell them how they launched it so well.
Whilst its true that more and more people will consume content over various handheld devices the idea that the traditional TV will be replaced is going way, way too far, in fact the sales of TV sets continue to rise as advanced models get cheaper and people have multiple TV's in their homes, you can now buy huge HD TV's for about 150 quid!
You are right that you can download BBC content (for free) to these non-TV devices, but you cannot download every type of content, live broadcasting (of sports etc) cannot be done over the Internet at present (not in UK that is) because there is not enough bandwidth to do so.
If people want to watch live TV events - and they obviously do for sports and special occasions like the Queen's Jubilee this year - then you have to deliver that via terrestrial broadcasting (or have everyone install a satellite dish and get a STB which is not always possible) - and enforcing a subscription-based service delivered via terrestrial TV is very hard and expensive to do.
I agree that the mandatory license fee does seem anachronistic but in the case of the BBC then - as long as people want broadcast TV - there is no other viable model available.
Another reason that the traditional TV market will stay around for a long while to come is that it is the fulcrum of the advertising market, if you move all content to downloads/streaming the advertising market would collapse because advertisers don't trust the 'new media' market in the same way they trust the TV market.
The advertisers can get 'hard data' on who is watching what and at what time on 'traditional TV' through the AC Nielsen (or whomever) viewing panels, this enables them to make informed choices as to where they should spend their money - they have very little visibility on the Internet and so cling to TV.