Hacker News Reader

Comment by hardtke | Hacker News Reader

Presumably the BBC outbid other British channels in a competitive bidding process. I suspect that broadcasters in the rest of the world know that 20 minutes of commercials per hour is unacceptable, so they don't bid as much as our networks. EDIT: The only source I could find indicates that the BBC paid about $100 million for broadcast rights to these games. That's 1/10th of what NBC paid, or about 1/2 of the American fees on a per capita basis.

View on HN

In many countries (including the United Kingdom) the amount of commercials that can be broadcasted per hour on terrestrial broadcast is limited by law or other regulations. The UK is special in that the biggest broadcasters (BBC, ITV, Channel 4) are all publicly owned.

Edit: as others have pointed out, ITV is not publicly owned, but Channel 4 (and obviously BBC) are.

>The UK is special in that the biggest broadcasters (BBC, ITV, Channel 4) are all publicly owned.

No, no, no. Only the BBC is 'publicly owned' (e: ok and channel 4 is although commercial- the point was definitely not ITV). They do have some regulatory requirements, though.

Do tell us who you think owns Channel 4.

ITV is not publicly owned. Channel 4 is though [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Four_Television_Corpora...

I would also add Sky as one of the biggest broadcasters, certainly by revenue. They are commercial pay TV with some advertising broadcasting on their own satellite platform but with some of their channels also available on cable and terrestrial. Not everyone has the Sky channels.

Yes BBC is fully public corporation of it's own unique type (Corporation by Royal Charter - I think). Largely license fee funded with the rest coming from its commercial arm selling content (mostly overseas) and also books, magazines and back catalogue content in the UK.

Channel 4 is a normal company but government owned. Funded by ad revenue.

ITV is mostly ad funded and fully commercial. It used to be a group of regional companies (a bit like US affiliates) but they have all merged to one big company.

Due to my job, I work a lot with these broadcasters, especially Channel 4. From what I can tell, even though they are commercially funded, the folks over there in Horseferry Road try to take their "publicly owned" status seriously and try to act with the "public interest" (whatever that means) in mind. For example, I know that at least unofficially, they try really hard to help and support small, independent producers.

The US used to be one of those countries until Ronald Reagan signed a bill removing restrictions.

"June 28, 1984: President Ronald Reagan signs 'The Cable Communications Act' into law. During his first term in office, President Ronald Reagan approved "The Cable Communications Act," groundbreaking legislation that, among other things, lifted time restrictions on television advertisements. The stage was now set for the long-form infomercial."

http://news.yahoo.com/crazy-tv-products-evolution-infomercia...

I believe that it is the last year of a pan-European deal between the IOC and the EBU/Eurovision which is the club of largely public service broadcasters from across Europe (quite widely defined not just the EU).

The BBC has just done its own deal for the next few Olympics with the IOC.

I believe the BBC gets it by default being the state broadcaster.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com