It's a (fat) pipedream and nothing more.

I engaged in some twitter banter yesterday over the Tories announcement that they plan to deliver "superfast" broadband to the majority of Britain's homes by 2017.

Pie in the sky perhaps,after all 2017 is a long way in the future,the Tories would have to win two elections to bring that promise to fruition and we come to the old arguments about who should pay for it etc etc etc.

George Osborne today set out the party's proposals in an interview with the BBC's Andrew Marr Show using what he termed market based solutions meaning that the government will not eb investing in the infrastructure.

As Adrian Slatcher pointed out to me on twitter

remember those wonderful canals & railways mostly built by Irish &Scots labourers, 4 the benefit of the rich

Surely hyper fast broadband is too important to rely on the wims of the private entrpreneur

As Martin Bryant also pointed out to me

t's a (fat) pipedream and nothing more.

I stand by what I also said on twitter,perhaps rather cynically but true

as with many things on the digital/media/creative world lots of talk but when it comes to paying for it........?

Peter Mandelson and the Digital economy Bill-the musical

Ht-Comment is Central

Times claims broadband costs could treble

This morning's Times reports that it has seen a leaked memo which suggests that two million homes will pay more than three times the broadband levy initially proposed.

The plans, drawn up by Revenue & Customs, show that ministers will tax households with more than one phone line — of which there are more than 1.7 million — for each line they rent, and will also levy VAT on the charge.

says the report adding that

Families with one telephone connection, a separate line for broadband and another for a fax would end up paying £21.15 a year, instead of the originally announced £6. The Finance Bill, to be published early next year, will contain the plans for the 50p a month tax, which ministers hope will raise up to £175 million a year to fund superfast broadband connections for rural areas.

The UK needs to look at lessons in broadband adapation

Lesson for the UK?

Across the Atlantic,The Federal Commission has listed seven obstacles in the road towards universal use of broadband.

In the United States almost two-thirds of adults have broadband connections at home, but of course that's a long way from the country's ultimate goal.

The biggest problem according to the commission,

The Universal Service Fund. The USF was created to directly subsidize phone service for low income people and to support service providers in rural areas. It does all that, but at an exorbitant cost and with increasingly irrelevant results. The United States now spends about $7 billion every year to support this pooch, a result of lousy auditing methods, goofy standards for measuring provider costs, and an intercarrier compensation system that was designed for a pre-IP-telephony world.

However it also identifies

2. The broadband adoption gap.

3. The consumer information gap.

4. The spectrum gap.

5. The deployment gap.

6. The television set-top box innovation gap.

7. The personal data gap.

Take a look at the full article here

Ht-Stephen's Lighthouse

Gripes and moans about the Digital Bill

The internet was alive with the Digital Britain bill yesterday.

The main conclusion it seems was that most in the digital and media professions are not happy with it.

There is a good synopsis by KPMG’s director of intellectual property Mark Harding over at Paid Content.

His main gripe being that

there appears to be too much focus on policing the net rather than promoting digital enterprise and access. Ultimately, piracy measures alone will not solve the underlying issue of revenue models for content owners.

For Mark the key area which remains undefined is how to measure the target of reducing file sharing by 70 percent.

In recent months, file sharing activity has seen a reduction, which could well be due in part to the growing popularity of music streaming sites, particularly among young people, enabling those who simply want to access content rather than own it, to do just that.

Media and technology are struggling to adapt in the new economy

New research from Deloitte has found that, while many industries suffer from intense pricing pressures and falling return on assets, the media industry is doing worst of all. In fact, the industry now has a negative return on assets of 4.4 per cent, compared with a positive 7 per cent 40 years ago.

writes John Gapper in the FT this morning and interestingly he adds that

although one might think instinctively that profitability is transferring from media companies to technology companies, the latter are themselves struggling to adapt.

Indeed it appears that increasing competition in the sector is leading to falling returns for assets in these businesses.

Hunt says Tories will abandon plans to tax phone lines

Apparently the Tories would reverse two of the main proposals in the government’s Digital Britain bill and are considering plans to rip up the BBC’s royal charter.

This morning's FT reports that shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt,in an interview with the paper said a Tory government

would scrap a proposed 50p a month tax on all telephone lines, aimed at raising about £175m a year towards the cost of funding superfast broadband to UK homes, “as soon as possible” after the election, expected in May and,also promised to reverse government plans to force the BBC to share £130m of the television licence fee with other broadcasters.

Tories propose a local news service

An interesting development from the Tories and its not David Cameron's attempts to get down with the kids on Radio 5 yesterday.

It's proposing the creation of 80 independent cross-platform, ad-funded news companies staffed by professional journalists and community volunteers to fill in the gaps left by the shrinkage of local newspapers and the switch-off of ITV’s local news in 2012.

reports Paid Content

The report has been written by by former Johnston Press chairman Roger Parry,

It would be commercially funded through a mixture of: “Display and (a reduced volume of) classified advertising, sponsorship, product placement, retailing, copy sales, by selling news services to regional and national providers and by providing local media services.”

but as the site rightly says

it is a big question mark whether the market can sustain local news in any format without at least some public subsidy.

Digital Britain on local and community

I was quite interested in what the Digital Britain report had to say about community and local media.

Digging into the report there are some exciting points to a hyperlocal future

61. Local websites of all shapes and sizes are providing community news and information to hundreds of thousands of people. Most of these sites are volunteer run, using free publishing platforms like www.wordpress.com with no hard costs. They show that grass roots media can provide an accurate, reliable,popular sources of news and information without regulation or subsidy. Their news values and thresholds are new, reflecting grass roots interests and priorities.

62. Community sites with no costs can serve very small, human news geographies of a single ward or a few streets. Community websites with no old media legacy are able to discriminate between types of media production to suit local needs. The written word and photos predominate, sound and video are in a minority. In some communities with established local sites the readership within the community appears comparable to that of traditional news media.

63. Digital Britain is at the beginning of a new and possibly disruptive wave of local news, generated by communities for communities using free online media. Over the medium term this has the potential to be good for local pluralism and expression as commercial funding for traditional media diminishes. 4IP and Screen West Midlands are making a major investment in Talk About Local to create hundreds of new community websites by giving community activists the simple skills. Digital Mentors are taking a similar approach on a smaller scale.

Ht-William Perrin

Digital Britain-a round up

I was out most of yesterday so missed the assault on the blogosphere about the Carter report on digital Britain.

Looking at the headlines this morning it seems that the main issue is over the levy on phone lines to pay for broadband.Yes you would expect it on the front of the Express but not also as the main headline for the Times.

I sincerely hope that this is not the main message that is remembered from yesterday but I fear that it will be.Let's just put in into context,£6 a year,that's about 12p a week.

There are some good reflections in the papers this morning.In the Telegraph Neil Midgley thinks that Lord Carter has missed an opportunity

The unpalatable prospect is that, as the featherbedded BBC continues to steamroller its private-sector competitors, those shiny new fibre-optic cables might end up with precious little commercially produced British content to carry.

Midgley goes onto say that despite moves in the right direction

Lord Carter's report will leave ITV locked in regulatory squabbles, when it should be focusing on making great programmes. The result could be that ITV ends up bankrupt

and with Channel 4

A truly visionary step would be to remove Channel 4 from the advertising market, and give it a big slice of the licence fee instead. That would have made a real difference in balancing the public and private sectors, and forced the BBC to rethink its apparently infinite ambitions.

The FT believes It is time to chop up Auntie.

Lord Carter’s proposal cuts to the heart of the problem: the BBC cannot be allowed to become a monopoly provider of public content and this liberalisation, if extended, would allow plurality of provision without the current reliance on vulnerable cross-subsidies.

The Times says the report

shows an extraordinary willingness to extend government intervention into almost every nook of Britain’s broadcasting and communications industry.

adding that the meddling as it puts it

not only discounts the power of creativity and innovation in the market, it destroys it.

more sketch than blueprint says the Guardian

At 238 pages and 22 "action points", innocent readers may have been reminded of Pascal's rueful admission that with a bit more time he would have written a shorter letter; because this was a publication long on consultation and in many places frustratingly short on conclusion.

and adds that

It deals with structure and delivery of content, rather than the content itself. It worries about provision of local news, but (with the exception of a potentially interesting proposal on a role for new local news consortiums) decides that the main answer lies with regional TV news

For the Independent

For most of us, it is the micro-geography of the digital revolution that has most impact on our lives. The television set is less and less the focal point of most modern homes. In many cases, it is now a flat screen connected to a bewildering array of boxes, consoles and computers, while other flat screens in other parts of the room, or in other rooms, are also used for watching television or YouTube or for switching between reading and watching clips of news on the internet.

More on the role of the BBC post Carter report

I wrote yesterday that one of the question's that will arise following the digital Britain report in the future role of the BBC which unfortunately will always distort the market.

Evening Standard columnist Paul Waugh agrees and as a starting point would like to do away with the BBC news web pages.

there is a case that the BBC licence fee should not be spent on websites or any internet activity at all, that it should be restricted to broadcasting alone. There is a huge grey area about whether you need a TV licence to receive broadcasts via the internet rather than a TV set. But although the Beeb wants to reach as large an audience as possible, its main source of funding is a "TV licence" not an "computer licence".

Peston on our media obsession

on the day that Carter's conclusions are published, one question is why the digital industries are more deserving of ministerial attention than - say - pharmaceuticals, or defence, or motor manufacturing, or food and drink, or civil aviation.

Writes Robert Peston this morning,noting that this may well be the first time that the country has seen a white paper on digital Britain.

But is it for the best as he adds

If you work in those industries, you may think "thank goodness ministers aren't meddling with us".

A distorting Beeb but is that the price we have to pay?

As we all wait in readiness for the Carter report,Philip Stephen thinks that there is a fairly simple answer to the problems in the media

British broadcasting is sliding towards monochromic mediocrity. Counterintuitive as it may sound, the best way to rescue it would be to cut funding for the BBC and share out the proceeds of the licence fee.

Easier said than done but the point is that the BBC does distort the market.

Whether that distortion is the price we pay for a quality media package is the debate that needs to be had