BBC 'to close recipes website' as part of £15m savings | Hacker News Reader

BBC 'to close recipes website' as part of £15m savings

bbc.co.uk

32 pointsiamflimflam149 comments

Absolute vandalism. A public good has been built through a long term investment, but because it cuts against the interest of the commercial backers of a political party (commercial backers who have had every opportunity to grow a similar, competing, asset), the asset is wilfully destroyed. The politics of vandalism.

The recipes are likely to be archived, not removed.

Existing content is not being destroyed.

They haven't actually confirmed this.

> mostly likely become archived, not removed

That sounds very easy to backtrack on or interpret in some unintuitive way.

Removing the recipes entirely (as opposed to shifting them to the commercial BBC Good Food website, or making them available via an archive) when the cost of making them widely available in perpetuity is likely negligible, would indeed be outrageous and draw widespread condemnation.

That is not what is currently being proposed, however.

Even in the worst case scenario, they will certainly be archived and made available unofficially.

The line going around is that recipes from new shows would be available for 30 days only, so I assume after the 30 days are up they would become unavailable.

Yeah right. This is the BBC you're talking about. They had to ask pirates to send them their copies of ancient Doctor Who episodes when they realised there was some value in them.

This isn't quite true. The recipes will remain at URLs, if you know the URLs. However the indexes and searches and so on will no longer exist. Plus new recipes (the BBC has many food programmes) will only be available online for 30 days, not indefinitely.

In other words, the recipes are likely to be archived, not removed.

Existing content is not being destroyed.

If I had the inclination I'd consider this plan of action:

1. Scrape all recipes from the site.

2. Wait until the large chunk of recipes has been removed.

3. Scrape the site again, and work out which recipes have been removed.

4. Throw up a domain and publish the recipes.

5. Profit? Or satisfaction in keeping alive a great public resource.

> publish the recipes. > public resource

Copyrighted. You could do the above but you'd need to do so outside of the law.

Except that recipes are not covered by copyright. http://opensourcecook.com/recipes-copyright-law

Simple instructions aren't covered, but the exact wording not to mention imagery, CSS, Javascript etc is very much covered by copyright.

IANAL and this isn't the US, but in the US, (I believe) things created with public funds are in the public domain.

for step 1, httrack can do this quite easily https://gist.github.com/phelma/3006ce53997e18a263f478e043a36...

You could also simply download all the recipes listed on their sitemap http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/sitemap.xml

   1. Scrape all recipes from the site

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11712665

For point of reference, a chauffered driven car for the BBC chairman costed £100,000 a year in 2011:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/michaelcrick/2011/05/ne...

I'm sure cutting a few layers of management and their associated perks would yield more than enough savings compared to vandalising publicly-funded content.

The real reason is here:

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jul/05/osborne-accus...

> You wouldn’t want the BBC to completely crowd out national newspapers

By this, George Osbourne means friends of the Tories like Paul Dacre and Rupert Murdoch.

Similarly, rather than revealing the names of those the BBC pays more than £450,000 pa [1], why doesn't the BBC just... stop paying people more than £450,000?

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/may/12/government-to-f...

The BBC is one of the great things about the UK. Unfortunately, it's constantly being attacked, especially by the right wing media and Tory politicians. The reality is that some things have to go, if only to placate them. If it's BBC3 and a few bits of the website, then so be it. As long as BBC2, BBC4, R3, R4 and the World Service remain, it's not the end of the world.

First they came for BBC3 and I said nothing...

Unfortunately, this ideological salami slicing doesn't magically stop when only the parts you care about are left.

Hope the internet Archive can grab these. Or that the BBC can send them to the IA.

My initial reaction was one of horror, I prefer the recipes to others on the internet.

However you have to understand the BBC is a monopoly which is giving things away for free. That is stifling innovation because a new entrant has a high barrier to entry. Ideally the BBC should bundle it all up and release it as Creative Commons.

The void created will be filled, it won't use public money and will have to innovate to survive.

I am very proud of the BBC, especially the news. Finding low bias news is hard.

I'm not sure I agree with this sentiment. The NHS effectively gives away healthcare 'for free' and there's still a thriving sector of private hospitals.

Having some recipes on the web via the BBC and their programming does not in any way stop people from putting up recipes in other places. I'm not sure what exactly one would want to be innovative about online recipes exactly either.

As someone who uses this site weekly I'm going to be very sad when it goes.

> Having some recipes on the web via the BBC and their programming does not in any way stop people from putting up recipes in other places.

Actually it does, the recipes are copyright of the BBC. If you wanted to run a website supported by adverts to help fund your experimentation with new ideas. The BBC currently has a large market share and you're not likely to bother investing time and money into a project because of the body of works the BBC has.

> The NHS effectively gives away healthcare 'for free' Health services are a basic human need that every human on the planet requires. I strongly believe in the public healthcare over private healthcare. I also love the BBC, however we do have to define boundaries so we don't stifle innovation.

The best resolution would be that the BBC recipes, and all future ones, fall into Creative Commons or even public domain after 30 days.

> I am very proud of the BBC, especially the news. Finding low bias news is hard.

Totally objective news reporting is virtually impossible, and BBC News certainly has its biases.

Agreed. As somebody with different biases than the BBC, I often find it to be quite biased indeed.

For those interested, a recent piece from the IEA on bias within the BBC, both perceived and actual [1]

As always, if you don't perceive any bias, it's probably just because you have the same biases.

[1] http://www.iea.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/files...

Nothing shocking or groundbreaking, but an interesting read. Thanks!

I've no idea why you're getting downvoted. The bbc has more claim to being fair/balanced than the likes of Fox, but it's known to have its biases. As a Scot the anti-independence line they had during our independence referendum was pretty clear, and turned a chunk of people north of the border against the Beeb. These are people who otherwise had no issues with the BBC, and in another reality where this didn't happen would have been staunch defenders. Pity.

> the BBC is a monopoly which is giving things away for free

The £145.50 I pay a year for my TV Licence begs to differ with your definition of "free".

Agreed. George Osbourne disagrees: "If you've got a website that's got features and cooking recipes - effectively the BBC website becomes the national newspaper as well as the national broadcaster. "

The existing recipes will be archived and made available, either officially or unofficially. That is not the issue.

The real issue is that, until this point, virtually every British household has been forced (and enforced, by thousands of criminal convictions every year) to fund a bland, outdated, unnecessary recipe website.

The BBC does not exist to provide generic content that pleases the masses. The BBC should not be popular.

If a service is popular, it is likely commercially viable, and should not therefore be subsidised by the license fee.

That's a very one-sided view. It has been very popular because it is of high quality (how on earth is it bland or outdated?) and not bloated, without any intrusive ads; that's what the Beeb is about.

> The BBC does not exist to provide generic content that pleases the masses

The BBC produces Eastenders. I can't think of a better example of generic content that pleases the masses. Then throw in all the late morning/early afternoon programming targeted at older people such as Bargain Hunt and the like

Indeed, there is plenty wrong with what the BBC has been doing.

What I think a few people are missing is that it's not the savings, it's a potential revenue generating scheme. The BBC still has these recipes. The BBC still creates cooking shows and produces new recipes.

The BBC can sell the recipes to their own or other publishing houses, papers, and other companies around the world. For example: the article itself describes how BBC Worldwide (The main commercial for profit subsidary) still has their own recipe site.

I think you are missing that fact that being a "potential revenue generating scheme" is not what the BBC is setup for, nor is it what the UK general public (which the BBC serves and is funded by) wants. This is why BBC Worldwide already exists and is operated at 'arms length'.

I would be glad if the BBC was to become self-sufficient.

Agreed. I don't have any objection to the BBC providing the recipes on a commercial basis (via the BBC Good Food website or similar), and even investing in new content if it's profitable, but the license fee should not be used to subsidize a recipe website.

We've already paid for the recipes through our substantial license fees (about £150/year, so I've spent many thousands of pounds just myself).

So the BBC should make some money off it (at least from users outside the UK), and plough that money back into producing new content.

The license fee is so high because the BBC are throwing money at things like this.

I'm not enough of a fool to think that the BBC scrapping all these "inefficiencies" will cause the license fee to be reduced...or even stay the same

I'm a bit confused as to what they're shutting down. It is bbc.co.uk/food/recipes? I gather that they're keeping BBC Good Food though, which is good.

It seems that if it the above url, it would be easy enough to scrape, since all recipes are in form /food/recipes/recipe_name_id.

Just BBC Food (www.bbc.co.uk/food)

BBC Good Food is a commercial offering from BBC Worldwide and is unaffected.

This makes sense. BBC Good Food is much better anyway.

Interesting as they only revamped the site a couple of years back, to much internal back patting, followed by lots of user complaints.

The Conservatives can't stand seeing a publicly funded body being successful and useful.

As much as I dislike Peter Hitchen's politics, he has it right when he says that both major parties are now just commercial organisations, who raise money wherever they can get it to buy their way into office through unscrupulous election campaigns. They then presumably reward their donors once they are in office. The electorate are a constitutional necessity for this process, but otherwise their fears, hopes and desires are largely irrelevant.

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