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Comment by chippy | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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