Is the BBC concentrating on too-much off-screen activity?

The BBC seems to have some funny ideas about what it is supposed to do. Its new 'open centre' in Hull is a glorified internet cafe and flogs coffee - Iv'e not seen that anywhere in the BBC charter - they claim to have had 100,000 people through the door since it opened and are very proud of the fact. Should they not concentrate on improving programming rather than these non core activities?

I agree the BBC should be accessible. The Beeb are very touchy about not competing or duplicating services ie closing the cult website et al so opening an internet cafe in the city centre in direct competition to businesses seems a little strange. Most of the BBC's new region is rural. Approx 20% of the regions population lives in Hull & has access to this new centre. They would have been better off investing in more BBC buses and getting out into the counties. They could have built the new centre far cheaper and if they really must flog coffee open a small shop with a cafe in the city centre.
Its indicative of the BBC's current obsession with shopping centres. Demolishing Pebble Mill in Birmingham which cost them £1000 per annum in rent and replacing it with the Mailbox which costs £2 million per year - I really cannot see how this equates to the BBC's value for money promise.

surely it increases access to the bbc's online services, which are now part of its remit. and of course the bbc's overall aim is to educate, entertain and inform, and as you know, becoming internet-literate gives access to pleny of educational, entertaining and informative bbc content. the people most likely to pop in to bbc hull are listeners to the bbc local radio station, who are for the most part middle aged or elderly, and the group who are most likely not to have a computer.

What a load of ****? Using that logic should the BBC be providing everyone with digital boxes to watch BBC3 / BBC4 etc as well!

Almost everything the BBC does is mostly for the good of the BBC, not for the good of the licence payer!

i know its pointless arguing with you, as you have an inherent dislike for the bbc, but i can assure you there are projects, ideas and practices that are a complete waste of the licence fee, but i think it is wrong to label this as one of them. its easy for internet savvy people like us to forget that there are huge swathes of the country who are not computer owners or computer literate, who have as much right to view the online content the bbc produce as us.

Just wondering what your thoughts are on the BBC's off-screen activities?


Is it really a valuable use of the licence fee to make BBC programmes - and even channels - available online?

BBC spends £11.8m on taxis

Tara Conlan
Thursday September 1, 2005

Spending on taxis by the BBC increased last year by 3.5% to £11.8m, despite attempts by the director general Mark Thompson to cut back.

In the year 2004-05 the cost of taxis paid for and arranged through the BBC's central booking system cost £11.8m - up from £11.4m in 2003-04.

The above-inflation increase may actually be higher, as the figures exclude those cabs that staff may have arranged and paid for through other means.

Taxis have long been a bugbear of BBC director generals. Mr Thompson's predecessor, Greg Dyke, famously tried to ban them - introducing shuttle buses to try to save money.

In the year to April 2000 the cost of taxis for staff and guests on BBC shows was £13.1m. The following year it was £11.3m, then £12.7m in 2001-02 and £11.7m in the year to April 2003.

A BBC spokesman said the increase was due to more people using the corporation's central booking system to hire taxis.

He said: "This has arisen primarily through BBC Northern Ireland and BBC Scotland now using the central taxi booking system, and greater compliance with the system by BBC staff throughout, which in turn enables the BBC to benefit from negotiating better deals with suppliers."

The Dutch cable companies pay the BBC for rights to re-broadcast BBC One and Two. Until relatively recently these were picked up off-air from large aerial arrays (in a similar way to the Channel Islands at that time) These days the BBC One and Two feeds are from DSat receivers - hence the skeleton text service that was re-introduced.

as to the closure of pebble mill, i'm the first to admit it was a mistake, and it really hasnt been value for money. not sure where the £1000/yr comes from, i heard £2000/month. any replacement for pebble mill was going to be costly, the bbc would have found it hard to be seen to scale back operations in the 2nd city to the size of a tunbridge wells-type operation.