Today, I was helpfully spammed by Amazon about South Park – The Hits Volume 2, which is now excitingly available. Containing random, out of context episodes I already own on DVD, this DVD with one of the laziest pieces of cover art in history (name, eyeballs, rating—it just screams ‘bargain bucket’) could be mine for just £6.49!

Never mind the fact that I’m still waiting on season 13 of the series, which was released on Blu-ray (for £49.99) back in March. Another search reveals, though, that Paramount Home Entertainment is finally going to allow people with a DVD to buy the series (for £24.99), albeit in September, six months after the Blu-ray release (which, remember, costs £49.99, which in NO WAY is the reason for the DVD version’s delay).

No doubt said DVD will still be stuffed full of adverts and anti-piracy garbage you can’t skip, along with a tiresome and lengthy snippet from an episode, before the menu appears. And companies wonder why so many people are drawn to torrents these days. As noted in the title of this post, Paramount Home Entertainment hates South Park fans—unless they own a Blu-ray and have deep pockets.

The media industry of course knows this and is scared by the prospect of falling physical media sales and the decrease of control digital brings, having ceded a lot of power to the likes of iTunes and Amazon’s MP3 store. Now, people can cherry-pick music tracks and individual episodes of TV series, without grabbing an entire album or box-set.

In an article over on Billboard.biz, Kristin Hersh argues that there is still a place for physical media. “I disagree with the recording industry which claims that music has been devalued by the Internet, but I admit that CDs have been devalued by an industry that put so much crap on them,” she says. “I wanted to push the idea that music is measured in impact rather than plastic while still giving people something beautiful to hold in their hands.”

Fundamentally, this is about value for the consumer. When the perceived and actual value of a physical object betters the digital equivalent, people will still buy it. However, the days are long gone when a recording artist can shove three great singles on to an album alongside a load of crud, and where a format-bump is enough to convince most consumers to buy all their favourite movies yet again.

* On that note, if anyone knows of a really good wireless or ‘connect to a wireless drive’ system that’ll happily playback DVD rips, QuickTime movies and so on, I’d love to hear about it.

BBC ‘rip off’ in perspective: licence fee = £2.80/wk (for TV, radio, websites). New Times paywall = £2/wk (for two websites).

I had two reasons for doing so. First, it shows that the BBC offers great value compared to supposed ‘direct’ commercial alternatives; secondly, it shows costs compared to a service from a company driven by Rupert Murdoch, the BBC’s main critic.

Predictably, responses have been split. The tweet got retweeted by a bunch of people and also ended up on Twitter’s home page for a while. Others have been angered by what I wrote, noting that you aren’t ‘forced’ to buy the Times Online if you want to read a newspaper, whereas you are ‘forced’ to fund the BBC if you want to watch Sky.

Two responses of my own to this common argument:

First, I equate the BBC to a public service that just happens to be very similar to commercial products. This happens elsewhere in the UK for funding things of cultural significance, such as museums. I’m ‘forced’ to fund museums I’ll never visit, but nonetheless have to pay to visit ones I’m interested in. Rather than stomping my feet about the unfairness of it all, I got over it in about a nanosecond, realising that the funded museums are there for the good of the country and are essential to the UK’s cultural landscape, providing what more commercial enterprises cannot or will not. I believe the BBC is the same.

Secondly, a lot of people are getting taken in by spin, which is mostly coming from Rupert Murdoch and his right-wing media lapdogs. They argue that the BBC is bloated and offers poor value, and the public is starting to lap this up. The thing is, this is total bollocks. The ad-free BBC, with its four main stations, radio and websites, is excellent value compared to commercial competitors.

However, Murdoch doesn’t really care about the ‘value’ of the BBC anyway. He just wants to see the BBC reduced to nothing, because then more people will be reliant on Sky for quality programming; he and his media cronies also dislike the BBC because it has the audacity to offer a relatively impartial stance when it comes to news, unlike Sky’s output that’s alarmingly tending towards the garbage you see on the likes of Fox in the USA.

So even if you don’t care for BBC content, realise that it needs to be there. And if you do care for it, now would be the time to say so to ensure its survival.

Jeremy Hunt, the incumbent culture secretary, has now suggested the licence fee could “absolutely” fall next year, using the excuse of the UK’s “very constrained” financial situation. (Source: MediaWeek.)

I realise some people are irked about paying for the BBC, but let’s put things in perspective. £145.50 is about £12 per month, or 40p per day. That’s less than the price of a newspaper, half a typical candy bar, or a third of a cup of coffee. It’s less than BT charges me for line-rental alone. It’s only 80p more per week than The Times is charging for online access to its two websites. And yet for your 40p per day/£2.80 per week BBC fee, you get a bunch of ad-free TV stations, ad-free radio (including Radio 6, which, as recent events show, has no effective competition at all), and an ad-free (if you’re in the UK) website, including decent, reasonably impartial news coverage.

Reducing the licence fee will force the BBC into terminal decline. Some will argue removing the BBC will improve competition, but it won’t. Rupert Murdoch already effectively drives everything else in this area, and so you’ll merely see increasing competition for advertising, leading to more dumbing down of content and increasingly advertising-led/advertising-friendly news. People will then pine for the “good old days” of the BBC, but by then it’ll be too late.

If you don’t want the BBC beaten to a bloody pulp, write to your MP. Alternatively, use the 38 Degrees site to speak out against BBC cuts and convince Vince Cable to stand up to Rupert Murdoch.

In an age of increasing rampant commercialism in the music sector, 6 Music is vitally important. It focuses on relative unknowns, doesn’t tend to force playlists on its DJs, and is therefore the closest thing we have left to John Peel. For up-and-coming musicians or long-time ones who never troubled the top 10, the station is essential, and for anyone with an interest outside the mainstream, it’s without doubt the best available station.

To that end, axing 6 Music is an astonishing decision, given the BBC’s public service remit. The argument from various idiots (including politicians and, unsurprisingly, News International) is that this is the kind of thing the commercial sector should deal with, making 6 Music a waste of the BBC’s funds and, by extension, licence payers’ money. But musicians outside of the mainstream are often not commercially viable and are therefore ignored, hence why even stations claiming to champion genuinely ‘indie’ music don’t—they instead tend to focus on artists majors are attempting to thrust into the spotlight.

Phill Jupitus has described the axing of 6 Music as “an act of cultural vandalism,” which is bang on the money. Thompson argues that the report—including the removal of 6 Music—is about “putting quality first,” which doesn’t ring true when the teens-only disaster that is Radio 1 gets to live. Clearly, this is about commercial viability—in other words, 6 Music is simply seen as too expensive to justify. That the digital station is being scrapped on the basis of a lowish audience share just prior to the digital switchover is idiotic, however.

This all said, I have some sympathy for the BBC. Both the Tories and Labour are, for whatever reason, beholden to major media corporations and hang on their every word. Both use BBC bashing as a way to drum up votes among the ignorant who don’t understand the true value of the BBC. One minute, they argue the BBC cannot justify the licence fee, due to low ratings. So the BBC responds by becoming more mainstream. Then the politicians argue the BBC is competing against existing commercial product, which is against its public service remit. Today, all these things are clashing, and the BBC is somehow accused of being too niche and yet also competing against existing commercial product.

Ultimately, this is probably the thin end of the wedge. With Thompson caving, in anticipation of a BBC-hostile Tory government, these won’t be anywhere near the last cuts, and we’ve probably started on the path to a ‘shell’ BBC. While I’m sure that’ll make the Sky-obsessed, drunk on American imports, gleefully happy, this spells disaster for home-grown programming and television and radio that isn’t entirely advertising-dependent and therefore utterly aimed at the mainstream.

UPDATE: The Register reports that the BPI and indie association AIM claim “half of the music programming [on 6 Music] is never played anywhere else,” which rather puts paid to claims that 6 Music is treading on the toes of commercial competition, and that commercial competitors are best suited to championing the kind of content 6 Music plays.