With BBC director general Mark Thompson taking the fight to Sky (Digital Spy), arguing against News Corp’s intended takeover of Sky, debates are again erupting about the nature of the BBC itself. Again, people who happily spend £70+ per month on Sky are bitching about the rip-off licence fee, so let’s, briefly, imagine an EXCITING PRESS RELEASE from NewTVCo.

NewTVCo has a stupid name, but it’s just announced an audacious attack on the UK TV market. It’s going to provide four mainstream TV stations that will be ad-free, and unlike Sky it’s going to spend a huge wodge of cash commissioning local shows, rather than dipping into a diminishing pool of decent (or even half-decent) US shows. It’s going to provide —by default—major sporting events, top-quality drama, children’s programming, reasonably impartial news, sci-fi, comedy, and more. In addition to this, it’ll roll out an inevitable rolling news channel and a couple of stations to glue wee kids to the screen.

But there’s more! In a pincer movement, NewTVCo also has radio ambitions, and is to provide over half-a-dozen ad-free stations. Some will be mainstream, one will concentrate on indie music, another will be more highbrow. Everyone will be catered for (ad-free, remember) and a bunch of local stations will also be set-up to provide local news coverage.

But there’s still more! Online’s important, and so NewTVCo is going to turn NewTVCo.co.uk into a first-rate website. Again, it’s going to be ad-free, and it’ll provide some of the best news coverage around, along with background and communities for popular shows.

Of course, this won’t all come for free, but it’s going to be staggeringly cheap: £145.50 per year, to be precise, or about 40p per day. (By comparison, News Corp’s Times website charges £2 per week to access thetimes.co.uk and thesundaytimes.co.uk.)

Sounds good, right? You’d bite someone’s arm off for that kind of a deal, yeah? Well, then stop bloody well bitching about the BBC, because it’s already doing all of the above.

Police have arrested the operator of Mulve. Mulve is an app designed to help users download music, via a 10-million-strong database. According to the linked article, the smackdown largely came courtesy of the RIAA.

The thing is, Mulve was just a search engine, albeit one for a very specific purpose. If we get to the point where enabling access to naughty downloads makes operators liable, that’s a pretty worrying prospect—and you can bet the likes of Google and Bing (often the easiest, fastest way to source such download) won’t ever be affected.

The moral of the story appears to be: don’t specialise, stupid, or become so big that the RIAA won’t risk attacking you.

Wired reports:

The Obama administration has urged a federal appeals court to allow the government, without a court warrant, to affix GPS devices on suspects’ vehicles to track their every move.

The argument is that Americans should expect no privacy while in public, and so officers should be able to shoot darts with GPS tracking on to vehicles to track them. As despicable as I find the idea that you’ve no right to privacy when in public, what happens when the targeted, CLEARLY EVIL CRIM, who is presumed guilty from the off, returns home, where there is still an expectation of privacy (until the administration figures out how to do away with that trifling annoyance)? Presumably, the US government has developed magic darts, which drop off a vehicle when it returns to private property! Yes, that must be it!

Reuters reports on NBC Universal Chief Executive Jeff Zucker saying it won’t offer 99-cent TV-show rentals on iTunes, mirroring Warner.

Zucker:

We do not think 99 cents is the right price point for our content. … We thought it would devalue our content.

Yes, I’m sure that’s your real concern, Zucker. It’s nothing to do with thinking that you’ll get the same amount of sales at the $1.99 price-point, which is frankly a bit of a rip-off, or that you’d ideally like to keep people buying overpriced DVDs rather than move to digital rentals. However, the likelihood is studios will gross more with low-priced rentals, and consumers will see such shows as good value for money, not ‘devalued’. (Again, see WoSBlog’s investigation into Pac-Man for iOS pricing for the reality of what happens when high-profile meets high-value in iTunes.)

I sincerely hope those who have signed up for 99-cent rentals—Fox, ABC, Disney Channel and BBC America—start making money hand over fist, at the expense of NBC and Warner. And, believe me, it pains me to say “I hope Fox makes even more money than it does now,” but something needs to give studios a reality check regarding TV rental pricing.

Stop the presses!

Qluso is an online app that allows news editors to screw over freelance journalists, paying them as little as possible, and making them BEG for ‘work’, while laughing like a fucking nutcase.

(The above isn’t entirely accurate regarding what it says on the website, but it’s pretty on the ball when it comes to what’s going to happen.)

Hat tip: Adam Banks

Update: Qluso’s Lyra McKee responds:

As a former freelance journalist myself, I worked with my team to devise a product that could help freelance journalists get paid the best price and get paid on the same day. We love newspapers and journalists: Qluso was built to help them, not screw them over. I have seen firsthand the problems freelance journalists face in their day-to-day work and I can understand why you would be sceptical given current industry conditions, but Qluso was designed to eradicate these problems and to improve the working experience of freelance journalists.