BBC 3 goes off-air tonight.

[Peter Corlett]

On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 09:17:17AM +0000, CJB wrote:
> To cater for the yoof market BBC 3 is going online only. However this is on
> the proviso that all ex-BBC 3 programmes are aired at least once on the
> 'mature' channels BBC 1 / 2 / 4.

Way back when the iPlayer was first mooted, that there was some concern that
content would go iPlayer-only and thus not be accessible to all licence-payers,
and so the BBC's Charter obliged the BBC to broadcast all programmes before
they were on iPlayer. Given that the original iPlayer was a nasty little
application that barely worked and had to be thrown away and done over, this
was a very wise decision.

So requiring a "repeat" on the remaining channels would appear to be how the
BBC are satisfying the letter of the charter. It's also a reasonable choice, as
a lot of linear TV watching still goes on.

A minor bonus is that BBC 1 and 2 are carried on some foreign cable networks,
and so this programming now becomes available to them, where before they were
prevented from watching it on iPlayer. (I assume the BBC are being paid for
this, but it seems unlikely that they're getting anything like £145.50/year out
of a €41/month quad-play subscription.)

> This latter is to the disgust of older than average licence fee payers -
> there's too much 'yoof' stuff on ITV as it is - now the Beeb is following the
> trend. Huh - just how many times do you want to watch "Don't Tell The Bride'?
> But that's moving to Sky 1 later this year.

The actual demographic target for BBC Three is 16-34, the upper end of which
isn't exactly youthful. The next band thus beginst at 35, which can argued be
be the onset of middle age, where one can be a miserable git banging on about
"yoof".

> Anyway I've just done a GiP cache refresh for Radio and TV and the former was
> as long as usual, the latter quite short.

I didn't notice TV being particularly short as it scrolled past on the screen,
but I tend not to pay much attention to it as I mostly only listen to Radio 4.
But Christmas is over, and it's just going to be months of filler and repeats
on TV until autumn rolls around again, so there will be fewer new PIDs to go
into your cache.

> BTW I wonder if the recent outages were caused by the Beeb engineers removing
> BBC 3 content from the iPlayer servers? The moot point being whether BBC 3
> online content will be available via iPlayer and get_iplayer?

It'll obviously be available via iPlayer but for now, you'll need to download
by PID. However, if the BBC didn't think it worth broadcasting, it's probably
not worth watching.

> Family Guy is moving to BBC 2 AND ITV 2!!! Yet American Dad seems to be left
> out.

If you're that bothered, just buy the DVDs and then you can watch it whenever
you want.