Ask HN: Would anyone like to join me on congratulating the BBC?

7 points·d4nt··6 comments

Despite serving up plenty of dynamic content and video, and despite huge traffic (http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2010/05/current_traffic_to_bbc_news_we.html), the BBC's election news website has been fantastic. It's been responsive, up to date and highly usable all night.

This is a real technical achievement and I for one would like to say well done.

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The £3.5bn they're given by the UK populace every year probably helps with that, eh.

The biggest beneficiary of that gift is the world at large, at least we have one somewhat independent news service.

I haven't lived in the UK for decades, but I love the BBC news service. It's a national treasure - well, an international treasure, as you point out.

Australia's ABC to a lesser extent is the same.

If a free-enterprise fourth estate fails, I wonder if more countries will create similar publicly funded versions.

The netherlands has the NOS, it's along similar lines but in a niche language (only 27 million dutch speakers world wide).

Nowhere near the budget and not even remotely near it in quality and coverage.

Yeah, even as an American I tend to use http://news.bbc.co.uk/ as my main online news source. Sure beats CNN, MSNBC, FoxNews, ABC, and the rest of that variety of nonsense.

Indeed.

We should be congratulating all the other news channels, the ones who managed it without unlimited resources.

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