some insights and thoughts

[Peter Corlett]

On Sun, Nov 02, 2014 at 11:56:38AM -0600, artisticforge . wrote:
[...]
> There are numerous other examples. Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, Ben Moor's
> Undone series, EarthSearch series 1 & 2, The Paul Temple series, The Charles
> Paris Mysteries, and the Lord Peter Wimsey series, Doctor Who Audio Books
> from Big Finish Productions, Sebastian Bacziewicz's Pilgrim series and
> others.

> We both wonder how many users of get_iplayer also support the BBC with
> purchases of CDs and/or DVDs.  I tend to think that I am one of few.

I have been doing so in a fairly extensive manner, but BBC Worldwide are
currently not doing itself any favours by being hopeless at actually making
things available to buy. Indeed, it feels like if it's not Doctor Who or Top
Gear, they're just not interested in anything more than a token effort.

Take Neverwhere. Broadcast in April 2013 and Amazon informs it it was released
on CD in September 2013. Not exactly going out of their way to exploit the
post-broadcast buzz there, but not too bad so far.

Undone was broadcast in March 2006. It's still not available to buy. By April
2013 -- long after anybody but hardcore fans, who will have already torrented
it years beforehand -- it became available to rent and play a poor-quality
version on a restricted set of devices from Audible. For this user-hostile
service, Audible often even charge a premium over what I'd typically expect to
pay for CD audiobooks, whereas I'd expect something like a 70+% discount given
how restrictive it is on use.  I did enjoy listening to that when it was on,
but if the BBC expect me to buy a copy for a re-listen, they'd better hurry up
pressing some CDs or at least offer up some FLACs for sale.

EarthSearch. Only the first series is available on CD, with the second series
having been deleted. You can buy a second-hand copy from chancers on Amazon for
a mere sixty quid, none of which the BBC, actors, or authors will ever
see. I'll pass.

Paul Temple stuff is effectively also absent from Amazon. The usual second-hand
chancers at silly prices, plus Amazon saying "Not in stock; order now and we'll
deliver when available" which is code for "we've reordered from the BBC but
they failed to deliver". *Some* of it is on Audible at their usual rip-off
rental prices.

Charles Paris. Amazon is listing the CD at a quite reasonable £10.41 and with
Prime it would be in my hands on Tuesday. Audible too for the suckers at
£11.54.  Another success in actually offering stuff for sale -- except I'm not
interested in this genre.

I could check on the others, but I'm not actually interested in buying (or
pirating!) any of those either. The picture is going to be fairly similar
though.

Now, I'm more into comedy and I've got many crates of DVDs and CDs, primarily
of BBC content. But the BBC only release radio series in a haphazard fashion
and it's typically impossible for me to wave cash and complete a series. For
example, I can't buy CDs of the last series of Old Harry's Game or the last two
series of Nebulous to complete my collection of those. Other things I don't
bother buying at all because the availability of episodes is so haphazard. When
the only thing on offer is a handful of non-sequential loose episodes out of
the dozens broadcast or even just a single CD with a heavily-edited compilation
of programme fragments, I may as well just turn on the radio or fire up the
iPlayer website and take pot luck on what's currently in rotation.

But maybe Amazon are just being evil and artificially limiting supplies of
spoken-word CDs to push their Audible product? So let's potter over to
http://www.bbcshop.com/ which is run by BBC Worldwide itself. Go on, try and
find anything on that badly-designed site. Its over-reliance on JavaScript
makes navigation so brittle that one is often presented with a blank page. Or
the search "helpfully" corrects to things you don't want:

  "Search results for nebulous was corrected to fabulous"

Thanks, but I already have the AbFab DVDs. It has its moments, but it's no
Graham Duff and Mark Gatiss. I can't even idly rifle categories for things I
might be interested in because they're so broad that it's lost amongst stuff
I've already got or don't want, and even a determined exhaustive search would
be foiled by the brittle JavaScript. Unless it's bloody Doctor Who or Top Gear,
which have their own special top-level navigation, you can forget having a
stress-free direct purchase from the BBC. I've never gotten as far as
check-out, but I bet it's just as customer-hostile as the rest of it.
Half-jobbed sites like that are the reason why Amazon dominate online sales.

Now, some of this availability mess is due to AudioGO going bust last year
rather than the BBC's fault, so the spotty availability is down to whatever
happens to be still in the distribution channel, but its replacement of "BBC
Physical Audio" isn't exactly picking up where it left off. There has been a
burst of enthusiasm to get a whole load of new stuff out, but a surprising
amount of it is being released *just after* Christmas, thus deftly dodging
another profit-making opportunity. They're not replenishing the stuff that
evaporated along with AudioGO.

A commercial broadcaster just wouldn't sit on its content like that, but we get
this due to the unique way the BBC is funded. Look at Network Distributing:
they're trawling ITV's back catalogue and banging it out on DVD as fast as they
can press the discs.

So to the BBC staff who are subscribed to this list and taking notes, how about
telling your lords and masters to stop turning away customers and just take my
money? :)