Britbox in the UK

[Lily]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47383559

“BBC director general Tony Hall said the aim was to launch “BritBox” in the UK the second half of 2019.

The price was not announced but Lord Hall said it would be “competitive”.

ITV’s chief executive Dame Carolyn McCall said it would home for the “best of British creativity”.

There are reports it could cost £5 a month.”

Although it’ll be interesting to see what ends up on the service, it’s another fiver to pay out every month. With every content provider starting up their own streaming service, you wonder if there’s enough room in the market for them all.

Topic

[thomasaevans]

The BBC actually need to open their fucking archive. They said they would on iPlayer, and BARELY have.

I’m sure they tried before, but it REALLY Would of made more sense to have all the UK broadcasters on iPlayer, with ads for non-BBC shows which can be avoided with a subscription fee which would ALSO give access to archive BBC & ITV programmes.

If this ends up being edited eps of Fools & Horses and that bastardised edit of the 5th series of Cold Feet where they turned 4 episodes into 6, they can fuck off.

It is tiresome to see the “i’ve already paid for these programmes” argument littering every comment section everywhere on this announcement.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

What I like about every service offering up it’s own subscription is that it means you really can pick and choose what you want to watch and pay for.

We were NEVER going to have one or even a small handful of services to cater for everything.

If you can pick and choose what you want and craft a set of streaming platforms around what you want to watch that’s great for the consumer and for the content makers who are getting paid directly from the people watching (sort of)

Wasn’t iPlayer restricted in the early days by some competition watchdog or a consortium of TV peeps so that it couldn’t release everything and fuck everyone else over? Then eventually they all did the same and left iPlayer in the wind.

Having a platform with all British stuff for £5 or even £10 a month would be great. Save having to hunt it down in dark corners of the net.

[Moonlight]

What I like about every service offering up it’s own subscription is that it means you really can pick and choose what you want to watch and pay for.

Can you though? Because it feels like we’re careening out of control towards a situation where almost everyone is going to be forced to pay for a shitload of streaming services just to cover all their favorite shows and movies, necessitating paying for thousands of shows and movies you’ll never watch.

Like cable. Cable. The thing streaming was the miracle replacement for back before it started fragmenting. The thing where the whole issue was being forced to pay for a million things you don’t want just to get the couple things you do.

Streaming put a massive dent in piracy for how convenient it was, but the more services everything gets split between the more piracy is going to seem like the only viable option to people who can’t spare the money. Especially in a world where physical media is being drowned by a system that’s inferior in every way save for convenience.

A lot of shows are only available in HD when you stream them. There is no Blu-Ray to serve as the consumer’s master copy. There is no way to watch them in the highest possible quality. You simply are not given the option to watch them in true high definition, just a highly compressed facsimile that looks like shit every time someone turns the lights off. I do not want to see Blu-Ray get drowned out by streaming, but streaming has the advantage of requiring no effort from the viewer.

Wake me when the average person has internet service capable of streaming even the same bitrate as DVD, because right now that HD movie on Netflix is actually anywhere from 1/8th to 1/4th the bitrate of that same movie on DVD in SD. If you care even the slightest bit about video quality, streaming can be an absolute pain. It takes all sorts of post-processing on my powerful UHDTV to hide how blocky and horrible Hulu looks.

Like always, it’s the people with standards who get fucked. If you don’t give a shit you’re free to watch shitty off the air TV rips in 320p cut for syndication and it won’t even occur to you that this is a really bad way to watch something.

Streaming services are super convenient, but they’re no replacement for watching a show or movie on the highest quality physical media available.

[Ben Saunders]

Katy said basically what I was too lazy to say, although I find Netflix quality serviceable – except yesterday it was playing in a lower quality than normal for some reason, probably my connection was poor.

You can always just torrent Blu-Ray rips.

[MANI506]

I’m not sure what the blu rays for BTE-XII are like quality wise in the US but I know the DVDs are either slowed down or have dropped frames. Britbox versions of these series look great to my eyes. Maybe I’ll pick up the blu rays one day to see if I notice the difference.

[Author]

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