What is the BBC doing?

The BBC seem to be enshittifying their digital services at an alarming rate, for no apparent reason.

Disclaimer

I should start by noting that bbc.com has always carried ads and behaves more commercially, being aimed at international users and not licence-fee funded. I have no particular issue with this. I also have no issue with the BritBox service. Despite wails that “we’ve paid for that content, it should be free on iPlayer”, BritBox of course carries various shows for which the BBC doesn’t have sole rights and needs to derive some income in order to be able to distribute them. Music sync rights are often problematic. The BBC has a golden ticket on music rights, paying a flat annual fee which lets them use any commercial music for broadly any purpose. But only for broadcast. This means even local news features or BBC Sport can use Coldplay or Bowie tracks where other broadcasters could not (without negotiating individual sync rights). But generally their golden ticket does not extend to perpetual streaming or commercial rights and is why made-for-TV films like Micro Men will never get a DVD release, only turning up on iPlayer for 30 days or so after being broadcast - the banging 80s soundtrack would be cost-prohibitive to license.

This post is aimed at bbc.co.uk and UK services as accessed by UK users.

Obsession with sign-in

Last year I uninstalled the BBC News and BBC Weather apps after they started pestering me to sign in. Notionally this allows you to “personalise your experience”. But there is no need for a fully fledged user account when most meaningful data like “home town” can be stored in the app (or as a cookie for a website). Similarly the News App let me pick a few topics of interest.

But no, they really want me to have an account. Which I do have for signing into iPlayer on my FireTV (again, I don’t really have an issue with some basic attempt at limiting iPlayer to License Fee payers). but which is quite unnecessary elsewhere in the ecosystem.

So I uninstalled the apps and used “Add to Home Screen” to bookmark the website, which works well enough (although the News site has no “back” button, presumably because of a misconfiguration in the PWA manifest). I have largely taken to using Windy anyway for weather with its more sophisticated layers.

But what do I get today when trying to view an InDepth article? This nonsense:

I would understand if InDepth were a paywalled commercial project which is advertised from BBC News. But it isn’t - it’s free, albeit more “magazine”/feature content than front page news. But you now need an account to read it. Why?

InDepth is highly promoted by BBC News - it’s the second tab, immediately adjacent to “Home”. You are strongly encouraged to visit it… and then log in?

There is no need to impose this on people, and there is no need to impose additional tech support burden on people with less technical family members who just about manage the website, but now want to know “What’s this? I pay my license fee and I’m in the UK. I should be able to see it!”.

As businesses go, I think I would somewhat trust the BBC with my browsing data. I don’t think the .co.uk is in the business of dealing with dodgy data brokers (the .com serves ads of course, so caveat emptor). Checking the browser network tab on BBC News, the only third-party calls are to scorecardresearch.com and dotmetrics.net - both audience research orgs who count the BBC as a client and don’t appear to have any connection to advertising. There’s no Google Analytics - just “mybbc-analytics.files.bbci.co.uk”, which points to an AWS CloudFront IP (the BBC use AWS).

But this just seems unnecessary. Why do they want it? I actually don’t want to heavily personalise my News homepage or feed. I want to hit bbc.co.uk/news and see what the issues of the day are (or what the editorial team have deemed most newsworthy, which is a separate discussion). You don’t get to personalise the front page of a newspaper to your tastes. Of course I have areas of interest, but I also want to be fed a diversity of news - that niche factoid which will be on a pub quiz in five years. I don’t want to be in a three-topic bubble of my own making.

Policy or procrastination?

There will be some underlying policy here pushing the BBC’s teams to be more like commercial providers, which is a great shame - because they’re not a commercial provider and should have confidence to say “no, that’s not who we are”. Or they want to track users for… reasons… even though they don’t sell data to advertisers. It’s also possible that the digital team are spinning their wheels, adding “features” that nobody wants or needs because they have nothing better to do. The harsh truth is that the BBC News website was basically feature-complete in 2006. A site with readable articles, an RSS feed and screen-reader compatibility for users not in a conventional browser. There’s nothing you can really add that will help me read articles more easily. Sure, you want spangly interactive features for election coverage and special occasions - data visualisation tools, etc. But the basic core experience? It’s just an accessible CMS where editors can arrange articles for people to read. That’s it. Stop fucking it up.