Paywalls and public service broadcasters
The move to putting content behind paywalls is gathering force. It struck me that if newspapers etc move in this way the role of sites such as the BBC and here in Ireland RTE will become even more important.
Now don’t get me wrong I have spent most of my career putting professional content behind pay walls of one form or another and have no problem with the concept, subscription models are good profitable and are a powerful form of aggregator for committed communities of interest.
But the cynic in me wonders if all of the attacks on the BBC in the past two years were really cynical attempts to reduce it to an ersatz state when you might then have to revert to an alternative commercial service for news.
I wonder what impact it may have on developments such as the “iplayer”. Perhaps less episodes of eastenders and more news and public service content is in order, but there are some tricky cost issues there to be managed.