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Comment by Nextgrid | Hacker News Reader

The BBC is welcome to encrypt their broadcasts and sell subscriptions directly.

This is not feasible. In the UK we have Freeview [1], a free-to-access television platform which manages ~all terrestrial output.

The BBC administrates this system along with the other major broadcasters (ITV, C4, ...).

If the BBC did not put out its own output under Freeview, not only would Freeview collapse but the BBC would effectively be wiped off the face of British television.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeview_(UK)

Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't Freeview just a marketing name for DVB-T (or T2 nowadays), which supported encrypted content since its inception and can mix encrypted & non-encrypted channels in the same multiplex?

Yes, and in fact Freeview started off as a primarily encrypted commercial service called ONdigital which was taken over by the BBC and turned into Freeview when it failed commercially.

This is correct but not every TV will have the slot for a decryption card. The UK has good broadband but far from the level of a universal public service. (That would be communism apparently)

That's a chicken & egg problem though. In fact CI slots used to be more popular but declined as the system was pretty much never used (pay-TV is typically only used for high-end services which then provided their own set-top-box offering extra features such as recording or catch-up TV services over the internet). The problem can also be trivially solved by cheap set-top-boxes (during the migration to digital TV, DVB-T tuner set-top-boxes were already inexpensive and technology has advanced even more since then) for the immediate future to avoid forcing people to upgrade their entire TV sets.

Key distribution is already a solved problem as well, the UK has a large userbase of smartcard-based prepayment systems such as for electric/gas meters or transport cards (Oyster card) and every tobacco/liquor store has a terminal that can sell or reload these cards. Expanding this system to reload TV cards is just a software update.

> The UK has good broadband

London has good broadband in parts. In the central postcode of a major city in 2019, I could only get 40Mbit broadband, pathetically low compared to the multiple 1-2Gbit options I have in the US for the same price or lower.

The BBC should have chosen the encrypted FreeView route when digital first came in so they could switch to subscription

Their focus on the easy money of a license fee, along with lines of “everyone loves to pay it” was going to land them in trouble sooner or later

If they'd have go subscription then, they could have chosen their own destiny

No they can't, their remit is set by the government.

How does this work with radio?

Is radio covered by the license?

But on a technical level it should be possible with DAB which actually has some adoption in the UK unlike most other countries.

Restricting DAB reception would be pointless unless they also turned off all non-digital am/fm broadcasts, which I think is unlikely.

I believe there was once a separate BBC radio license, but they gave up on that long ago. So now BBC radio is financed from the TV licence fee, but there's no requirement to have a TV licence to listen to radio.

> unless they also turned off all non-digital am/fm broadcasts, which I think is unlikely

Very unlikely at present. Tangential fun fact: the ongoing broadcast of BBC Radio 4 on longwave is (one of?) the means by which British nuclear deterrence submarines ensure Britain hasn't been destroyed.

https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manches...

The license fee used to solely be for radio - prior to TV being widespread.

There's an argument that the same shift should happen to be an internet license, but the idea has never got off the ground.

Yes radio is paid for by the license.

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