You’re right. They hide their shame from curious limeys by geoblocking britbox.com, but a vpn trip to Texas reveals it looks like a load of old shit on offer (Twenty Twenty Six is probably good though)
So as for they should sell the full service to the rest of the world, I agree. i suppose it’s licensing issues or they’d be doing it already? Much of their programming is not made not in-house but by external production cos
They already sell it to the yanks as Britbox and are reasonably successful at it but the license fee currently covers about four billion quid of their six billion annual operating costs. They don’t have to do Netflix numbers but it’s a lot of subs to sell (assuming that it must remain free to UK viewers and of ads)
I meant to give a few of the alternative funding arrangements if the license fee were scrapped but I managed not to say that part out loud, oops
I still think the BBC is worth preserving but I’ve no idea how it should be done
Direct gov funding seems out of the question as independence is required for reputational reasons at least
Extending license regs so you need one to watch youtube/netflix/etc an obvious non-starter (hopefully)
Expanding commercial operations so they can sell access to archives through iplayer, overseas subscriptions, Huw Edwards merch etc might be ok but unlikely to raise the billions required to operate
At this point is it saveable?
I quite like this idea