Gov.com

December 22, 2006 by Jeff Jarvis

I don’t fully understand this but the British media regulator Ofcom is contemplating funding a new online competitor to the BBC to operate solely on the internet. Wouldn’t it be better to ise tat money to give tax breaks to media innovators and startups?

  • bittorrent

    If it was given to ‘media innovators and startups’ I suspect most of the money would effectively go down the drain.

    What’s wrong with creating a public service publisher that commissions content from anyone who can come up with a good programme idea and follow it through? There must be many skilled people out there who would happily spend a couple of months making a 30 minute show if they were given 10,000 pounds.

    With a budget of 350 Million Pounds a year I calculate that is 4.5 hours of new original content per day.

    We need to turn our back on the unimaginative elite who run TV and supply the dreary programmes these days. Something is very wrong when people such as Ken Russell can’t get commissioned.

    User generated content is all well and good but people have to eat. Give people money.

  • http://jackiedanicki.com Jackie Danicki

    User generated content is all well and good but people have to eat. Give people money.

    Jesus H. What do you guys have against the free market? Let people keep their hard-earned money.

  • bittorrent

    Well as a professional photographer and writer how do you prose I should survive? Do you work for free?

  • bittorrent

    > Jesus H. What do you guys have against the free market? Let people
    > keep their hard-earned money.

    And who exactly are ‘you guys’? Do you mean the hard working freelance photographers who can barely scratch a living these days, low paid journalists and people who work in TV (actually there are some on work-experience who don’t get paid at all they are so desperate)? How are these creative people any different from anyone who does any other kind of job? Do you work for free? You reckon creative people should work unpaid so that you can ‘keep’ your money? Why?

    You need to get into the real world where people have to earn a living to survive and stop living in some Disney fantasy. Next time you need a doctor or dentist I hope you will go to an untrained, unpaid amateur and see how well that works out. The creative industries are no different. It is a career, a vocation, about earning a living. How is it different ,the government giving money to fund a video-maker who makes content, compared to them funding healthcare and a doctor?

    Do you seriously think any of the great TV shows or movies would ever have happened if the talented people weren’t being paid to make them? Where are all these free unpaid working hours going to come from? You think that movies like the Wizard of Oz would have ever have happened with everyone involved working for free in their spare time and fitting it in around their ‘real’ 9-5 jobs stocking shelves down at Wal-Mart?

    It isn’t going to happen just because a bunch of white, middle-class American hippies who don’t live in the real world wish it badly enough.

    If people are going to give up serious amounts of time to make content then they have to paid for that time, so can eat, pay the rent and survive. Otherwise you will end up with only the idle rich being able to make TV.

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