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Comment by cfmcdonald | Hacker News Reader

I agree. The wake-up call for me that the streaming promise was hollow was when PBS Video went on line. I imagined it steadily growing to cover the entire back catalog of PBS. What a fabulous public resource that would be. Alas, no, it's a tiny slice of stuff with limited availability windows.

We supplement streaming Netflix with our local library system, which has a fairly deep collection.

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In Germany it was even worse. The public broadcasters launched a huge portal where you could watch pretty much everything in their catalog. The private broadcasters sued and won and now content is only available for two weeks after it was shown on TV. We paid for it to be produced by tax money, yet private companies were allowed to lock it up!

In Norway the public broadcaster have everything available for streaming. Well, as long as it's produced by the broadcaster at least. When it's produced by external studios things can get a bit complicated, but it seems like they've achieved agreements with most studios that produce content for the broadcaster the last couple of years. Even content the broadcaster have bought is usually available for at least two weeks, but I imagine it depends on the contract with the rights holder.

And speaking as a Norwegian expat with children, it's great. All hail NRK.

Pretty much the same with SVT in Sweden. They also have a site called ”öppet arkiv” (open archive) claiming to be one of the world’s largest TV archives.

Do you think the licence fee changes will affect this?

Finland's Yle has a similar thing.

What argument was used for forcing a copying decision upon the copyright holders?

I think it was something along the lines of unfair business practices due to public broadcasters being able to use taxpayer money...

Tbh that is one of the worst used of tax payers money in Germany. I wish I could opt out

"Fuck you, pay me?"

What was in the catalog ? Media produced by public broadcasters ?

yes. They didnt for example had the rights to upload some sport broadcasts which they were only allowed to show on tv.

Like it was already mentioned, this was about unfair business advantage, not about the actual copyright.

PBS Passport [1] is what you are looking for if you want to watch content that's outside of the original availability window.

[1] https://help.pbs.org/support/solutions/articles/12000043556-...

Wow only 60 USD/year! They're practically giving this publically-funded resource away!

As the other commentator has stated, the vast majority revenue for PBS is by member contributions, donations of broadcast rights, and distribution fees. In 2018, members gave $197,552,000 while public grants and contributions were $105,336,000. A quick look at their revenues suggests that public grants and contributions only make up ~16% of revenues for PBS. Without asking for $60/year for Passport (which you also get if you're a member) they wouldn't be able to do most of what they do.

https://bento.cdn.pbs.org/hostedbento-prod/filer_public/PBS_...

PBS is only about half funded by public sources. Apologies if I misread your comment.

It costs lots of money to digitize and host the old stuff. And the non-profit organization doesn't lend itself well to selling access - it takes time and effort (read "money") to research with the lawyers whether "selling" or "membership fees" or whatever other business model is legally acceptable under the organization's structure.

But since new content is shot in digital, and edited digitally, it's a minor step to convert for streaming and also broadcast so they just stick to that.

Torrent sites seem to manage it. I don't think it's about cost of digitizing but it certainly has to do with old business model having trouble to adapt.

FWIW a lot of work DOES go into making high-quality releases, running infra, writing tracker code and maintaining high quality, even on torrent sites. Sure, a dedicated small team of passionate individuals can do it in their free time, but it's still work. Also, hosting a torrent file is pretty different from running a streaming service, even if there are more or less turn-key video streaming pipelines out there these days (e.g. https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/streaming/ / https://www.ooyala.com/ / https://www.anvato.com/ / https://streamspot.com/ depending on what you're trying to do , live vs hosted content vs subscription vs something more custom )

They can host torrents at least. And then someone will make streaming over torrent (hint).

streaming/watching torrents as they download has been a thing for years.

That's what I was implying (hint).

Torrent sites aren't hosting the content though. They're just hosting some tiny files to connect you to the hosts of the content (seeders/peers)

The content (and associated bandwidth demands) comes from those seeding the torrent.

I think hosting could be solved somewhat easily depending on how much control PBS actually has of their programming. They could go peer to peer, which makes total sense for a public good.

Digitization costs are still an issue, of course. I wonder if they just have a tape archive or if there’s some internal effort to digitize everything already (maybe cheaper in the long run than storing a huge quantity of tape?)

It’s a bit annoying though when people complain about cutting federal funding for PBS under the guise of “saving Big Bird,” yet the taxpayer doesn’t have access to the fruits of those tax dollars. Similar to publicly funded research being hidden behind paywalls. If PBS has the money (some from taxes) to make the programming, they should have enough to provide the content for free either via their own streaming services or via commercial services.

They do have a free streaming service and they do stream stuff through YouTube. The availability of a show will depend on the licensing restrictions they have from the content producers though. It's the member stations that are the ones who are producing all of the content (or licensing it from other broadcasters (e.g. BBC) and production houses (e.g. Ken Burns).

Ah, right. The "that guy did it" excuse.

If they aren't legally obliged to purchase "broadcasting right" from "members", they can always stop doing so.

If they ARE legally obliged (or forced by corporate mob, depending on your preferences) to engage in the rent-seeking, their budget founding should be permanently set to zero.

At the very least, declare it all public domain, and provide BitTorrent links. Maybe something like Popcorn Time for PBS and other public domain works

They're often not public domain works and are not fully funded by taxpayers.

So maybe we should require it to be public domain? We complain about the government using proprietary software like Microsoft Windows so why not complain about royalties and copyright licensing agreements?

The whole industry makes no sense to me.

It makes no sense to be that Netflix doesn't own full, unrestricted rights to house of cards without paying anyone anything extra after the work is completed (residual).

They could but it would cost more to make as the people would want to be paid more without a residual.

Same here, once wanted to view some old Frontline from the 80's. Nope.

Ugh, the catalog of Frontline is insanely huge. What, am I supposed to pay $24.99 per DVD of previous episodes? uh, no, I will not. Please PBS, give us real access to your catalog.

Agreed. Went back to watch the "US of secrets" on Netflix last year, gone. It was on Kanopy last I checked at least.

WTF does public television think its doing with this strategy? Makes me want to pull funding.

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