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Comment by fredley | Hacker News Reader

For Game of Thrones it's not such an issue, but I do feel bad if there's e.g. an old BBC film I want to watch, but there's no way to get it legally, sometimes at all. Other times it's £20 for a DVD. No way I'm paying three months of Netflix subscription (or a large fraction of a license fee) for that.

The BBC has such an extensive and amazing back catalogue of content they wholly own. Why they don't chuck it on iPlayer is beyond me. I know they have it all on a digital platform internally already, format is not an issue.

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The BBC has such an extensive and amazing back catalogue of content they wholly own. Why they don't chuck it on iPlayer is beyond me

The infuriating thing is, we’ve already paid for it. Anything BBC should be “free” to anyone who had paid their TV license in the last year it was broadcast. We own it already, it’s sheer extortion to make you pay full price for a DVD.

> The infuriating thing is, we’ve already paid for it.

No you didn't. For the example, the BBC typically only pays independent production companies (which is about 40% of their output) a fraction of what the content costs to make because the indie retains distribution rights afterwards and can make up the rest with sales. Same with scriptwriters, or actors.

> The BBC has such an extensive and amazing back catalogue of content they wholly own.

No it doesn't. The BBC wholly owns virtually nothing.

http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20140603125500/htt...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/contributor_rights.shtml?chapte...

https://www.theguardian.com/law/2010/nov/25/bbc-archive-onli...

And more importantly, the things it does wholly own, it very rarely knows, legally, that it does wholly own, as the records aren't reliable. So it would involve a vast amount of legal time and risk to investigate.

It would be awesome if blockchain could solve the issue of rights management at the scale of media content. Tracking ownership of the individual parts (script, logos, video, etc) as well as the transfer of ownership of those parts.

The underlying data is unreliable. Throwing technology at it doesn't change that.

Agreed; but could we start with new media? This is a real nightmare for the industry.

> Why they don't chuck it on iPlayer is beyond me.

Because they would devalue new productions. The more license-payers watch old movies, the less they will watch Top Gear or Strictly or whatever it's supposed to be big now. This would mean less interest in new productions, less stuff sold by BBCWorld (or whatever it's called these days), less money going around... like all companies and organisations, the BBC wants to grow, not to stall.

This idea is based on the assumption people who'd watch stuff from BBC's old catalogue would, instead, watch Top Gear or Strictly. These are probably a couple different demographics, distinct enough to warrant separate delivery options.

No, it's not that. The BBC is tied up in the same licensing mess as everybody else in the media industry. Everything is licensed... scripts, individual rights, director rights, ownership is transferred, tracked, ends up with third parties. It's a complete, unholy, worldwide mess of ownership spaghetti under the hood, and that's at some level why the only alternative is torrents.

And much of it predates people even thinking about this stuff. Thus, you have a TV series like Northern Exposure for which the music was a fairly integral part and you can't even buy DVDs with all the original music included.

Even today, I was reading that one Black Mirror episode for which the closing song was just so on had licensed it for 15 years. Which is a long time but hardly forever.

Wierd to License something like that for only a few years. What happens in 15 years? They have to renegotiate a license or re-edit the show?

Yes.

Which is quite common (Scrubs for example has had to re-edit library music into most of it's episodes for most uses, instead of the original tracks).

What a pain in the ass.

If you own the song, seems like you'd want to avoid leaving money on the table. I wonder how common relicensing is vs. editing.

The problem is that when it comes time to relicense, there's probably very little value in the show left to the studio. And whoever is negotiating the relicense couldn't care less about the artistic vision of the 10 year old show's creator who picked the original songs. And whoever the right holder of the music is probably doesn't want to offer steep discounts because it weakens their negotiating leverage on other matters.

The main issue is that it's very rare for someone to "own" a song. The publishing, label, composition, mechanical and performance rights might all belong to different entities in different territories and sometimes even in different windows. Relicensing is pretty common for films, but less common for TV, because there's less margin. And collective licensing for broadcast happens in lots of territories and not for on-demand or internet distribution.

Licensing is generally complicated but it's often for some fixed period of time. I expect part of the problem is in the incentives. I get the credit if I can negotiate a lower licensing cost today. If the license expires in 10 years rather than 50, that's probably not my problem.

The creators of iPlayer must have had a meeting with the specific goal of making it worse than realplayer

Is it that bad? Compared to any other TV services' online offerings, it's leagues ahead.

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