Like most people at the moment, I am absorbed with the football World Cup finals underway in Germany.   Not only is the BBC broadcasting most of the matches via the terrestrial network, but they are also live-streaming them onto their website.  Quite right too.

Imagine my amazement when I read in the UK press yesterday that the Government TV Licensing Authority that is charged to collect £10.96 ($20 US) per month (from every household in the UK with a colour TV set, is on the lookout to whack a £1,000 penalty fine ($1,850 US) on anyone watching the streamed World Cup broadcasts on their home office or laptop computers without having first purchased a license!

Such Luddite and obscurantist nonsence is more reminiscent of  the Stasi police

Two years ago, during the Greek Olympic Games, the BBC offered the same service and it prompted me to write to the Financial Times as follows:

Have any of your readers been enjoying the BBC’s simultaneous live sound/video streaming from various events at the Athens Olympics?  Accessible on any computer connected to the internet via an ADSL or better connection, it is providing a near faultless service (marred only by the limitations of BT’s obsolete local copper network).  It affords a glimpse of what the future holds.  It’s great!

But why aren’t the BBC doing the same with ALL their TV channels …. BBC1, BBC2 et al?   Could it be that someone near the top of the Beeb who has some understanding of the real world appreciates that it would be shooting themselves in the foot with greater accuracy than the Team-GB archery team?   For this Olympic Games experiment is a stunning example of how ludicrous is the idea of persisting with the Licence Fee in this dawning broadband digital world.  Given that anyone anywhere in the world connected to the internet can view these digitally-streamed channels why wouldn’t everyone in the UK with a PC, laptop of PDA throw out their TV sets and thereby avoid the TV licence? 

But it won’t be long before some smart 16 year old little Jimmy decides that if the BBC won’t do it – he will and offers that same service by digitising the off-air signal of BBC1 received on his bedroom laptop and then giving it back to the world (licence-free) via the internet.  Then count to 3 while the OFCOM police try framing some innovation-busting piece of regulation or the Government dreams up yet more luddite-legislation (maybe all laptops, PDAs and PCs should pay the BBC licence fee?).  What nobody seems to appreciate is that in a truly broadband world (which is only being delayed in the UK because of the ill-advised reliance on ADSL) any attempt to categorise or regulate ‘consumers’ of information and content, differentially from ‘creators’ of the same, will be as ridiculous as trying to have one rule for the initiator of a phone call and one for the party being called.  When we all have symmetrical broadband connectivity (which is what Tony Blair says is the goal) then ALL the content will be created and consumed at the periphery by ‘any of us’ opting to do what yesterday only a ‘broadcaster’ had the means to do.

It is just another glaring and rather sad confirmation of how, since the enlightened legislation of the Thatcher Government in the early 1980s (which sought to position the UK ahead of the world in the coming IT revolution), the vested interests of the ‘analogue’ broadcasting and telecoms sectors have been successful in duping legislators, governments and regulators (not to mention investors) into tilting the law and tweaking the regulations and hyping the expectations in a manner so as to masque or delay their inevitable demise or deconstruction which will surely be brought about by their obsession with holding on to their fundamentally flawed and obsolete business models.   With private companies like BT and its competitors, it is we the consumers (and UK plc) that suffer, deprived as we are of open access to the oceans of fibre bandwidth that run past the end of our streets.  But with the BBC, we actually have no choice under a license regime but to foot the bill for this obscurantist madness and megalomania.  Where are you little Jimmy?”

Who would have thought that two years later, the grotesque and absurd would become a reality!