The innovating BBC

Sunday, July 10th, 2005

From a slashdot article:

“According to BBC News, the second series of “The Mighty Boosh” will be available to stream from the 19th of July, A full week before starting its run on BBC 3.
And then a comment from one of the slashdot readers:

It’s ironic that a socialist funded network can innovate faster than our great and mighty capitalist free market media can.

America used to innovate like this before MicroSoft and their gang came along… before the dotcom bust there was a huge sense of “let’s throw money into the great evolutionary genesis pit and see which species wins”. Now the winners have been declared by the decree of those with the big money, and new technologies are threatened with patent disputes or RIAA/MPAA lawsuits.

What the heck went wrong? How can we get our free market system working again?
Well, duh! It seems somewhat obvious, doesn’t it? Perhaps it’s because I live in the Netherlands and we have a lot more publicly funded things here than they do in the capitalistic U.S; perhaps it’s because I’ve witnessed a great deal of government-owned companies and public services going private over the last years. But one thing is sure: the quality of just about anything in a government owned enterprise is always better than that of a private counterpart.

I am surprised this actually surprises some people. Companies on the capitalistic free market don’t care about innovation; they don’t care about service, quality, image, their employees or their customers.. unless it brings in more money. If the projected costs of innovation is higher than the projected profits, then forget it. If the projected costs of providing quality customer service doesn’t weigh up against the projected profits they’ll lose if they don’t provide quality service, then forget it. All this and the negative impact it has on quality and innovation should hardly be a surprise to anyone.

The free market is about one thing and one thing only: Generating as much profits from offering as little as possible. Generating those profits and protecting them. Profits. Money. The BBC doesn’t have to care about whether what it’s doing will reach the largest demographic possible and will therefor make the biggest profits.

When the Dutch Railways (NS) went private, ticket prizes suddenly went through the roof and quality sunk to the bottom of the ocean. The Dutch Public Television Broadcasting produces some pretty quality shows and programs; the commercial stations only steal crap from U.S television and only broadcast proven-concept programs.

On a side-note: People often complain about everything publicly owned being so extremely bureaucratic. While this is in general not a good thing, it does allow for all the holes and gaps to be plugged. You know, the gaps you fall through with commercial companies when you need something that slighly deviates from their average customer’s needs.

Anyway, while publicly owned companies may throw money down the drain every once and a while, they do innovate and they do provide quality services that will never be surpassed by the free market. And when, like me, you’re not part of the largest, most profitable, demographic, you’re out of luck when dealing with commercial companies.