The document discusses ownership models, history, technologies, income, platforms & programs, and regulations & controversies of the BBC and Sky. Regarding ownership, the BBC is funded by a license fee voted on by Parliament, making it a public corporation accountable to the state. Sky was originally formed as a private company and consolidated itself quickly through acquiring broadcasting rights. Both organizations have faced criticism at various points in their histories for perceived political biases or anti-competitive practices.

1. Ownership models
BBC
Economically the BBC is funded out of general tax revenue, which is voted on
by Parliament. Economically, therefore, it is a state institution, as its resources
are those of state capital: it cannot, for example, diversify into Motorway
Service Stations, although it can run 'Enterprises, such as BBC books. The
state gives it a grant, which is voted on by parliament, the BBC only received
100% of license fee revenue after 1950. It is, effectively, a public corporation,
which is only accountable to the state, and not to Parliament.
Sky
Sky was originally formed in 1990 by the shareholder of Sky television and
British Satelite broadcasting. They intended to join up and form British Sky
Broadcasting, the original founders were Rupert Murdoch which is still a
shareholder till the present day and Brian Haynes. Year after establishment,
in 1991 BSkyB outbid BBC with the rights to broadcast the Premier League.
ITV was current broadcaster of Premier League football at the time. BSkyB
won the rights to show all Premier League matches allowing BBC to only
show the highlights of the games.
History
BBC
British Broadcasting Corporation publicly financed broadcasting system in
Great Britain, operating under royal charter. It held a monopoly on television
in Great Britain from its introduction until 1954 and on radio until 1972.
Headquarters are in the Greater London borough of Westminster.
Commercial firms that regarded broadcasting primarily as point-to-point
communications took the first initiatives in British radio after World War I. The
British Broadcasting Company, Ltd., was established in 1922 as a private
corporation, in which only British manufacturers were permitted to hold
shares. In 1925, upon recommendation of a parliamentary committee, the
company was liquidated and replaced in 1927 by a public corporation, the
British Broadcasting Corporation. Although ultimately answerable to
Parliament, the BBC has virtually complete independence in the conduct of its
activities. The British monarch appoints the members of the BBC Trust, an
independent 12-member panel, governed by a chairman that oversees day-to-
day operations.
British television service was interrupted during World War II but resumed in
1946. The BBC established its second channel in 1964, and it introduced the
first regular color television service in Europe in 1967. It retained its monopoly
of television service in Britain until the passage of the Television Act of 1954
and the subsequent creation of a commercial channel operated by the

2. Independent Television Authority in 1955. A second commercial channel
commenced broadcasting in 1982. The BBC’s radio monopoly ended with the
government’s decision to permit, starting in the early 1970s, local commercial
broadcasts.
Sky
The BSkyB network, on the other hand, has consolidated itself in a very short
time even though it has not been able to make a substantial dent in the BBC's
market share. The Sky network in the UK was bought by Rupert Murdoch and
rechristened as Sky Television in 1989. The initial response to Sky wasn't
very encouaging as advertising revenues were not picking up. The launch of
digital television by both ITV and Sky has taken technological sophistication
by broadcasting to a wholly different level.
Technologies
BBC
The BBC is the world’s largest broadcaster. As such, it sits at the sharp end of
the technological revolution upturning the industry in which analogue, sector
specific tools are converging with digital, standardized, commodity and
Internet-based technology. In many ways, the BBC has led that revolution.
The corporation’s iPlayer service – which allows users to consume BBC
content over the web – set the pace for the industry as it wrestled with the
move to online video, but the corporation has also struggled with technology
deployments at times. Its 10 year, £1.5 billion engagement with strategic
technology partner Siemens has drawn criticism from the Public Accounts
Committee in the past.
Ceefax
Launched in 1974, Ceefax was the world's first teletext service, a proto-
internet delivering text and graphics to British televisions. When normal
programs finished at the end of every day pages from Ceefax would carry on
scrolling, keeping insomniacs and night workers company through the wee
hours. Its cheesy synthesized music is arguably as iconic a sound of its time
as the squeal of a dial-up modem was to the 1990s.
Ceefax was first developed by the BBC as a way to transmit subtitles using
unused parts of the broadcast spectrum, but researchers at the broadcaster
realized that the same technology could just as easily handle full pages of
text. That led to the first test transmissions in 1974, with a formal rollout in
1976. Early television sets needed a special chip to be able to receive and
store the information as it was broadcast, what was iconic about it was the
fact that in order for a page to refresh the viewer had to watch the ticker at the

3. top right which slowly crept upwards as each page was rebroadcasted with
new information.
Podcasts
The BBC officially launched its podcast service allowing people to download
its radio shows in 2007. Since then The Archers’ daily podcast has been
downloaded 35 million times, making it a firm favorite amongst those who
want listen to the show later or again on their own MP3 player or computer.
The BBC has 320 radio programs available via podcast, including news
programs, documentaries and classics, like Desert Island Discs.
iPlayer
BBC iPlayer is an online service, which allows you to play TV, and radio
programs from the past week. It's often referred to as an 'on-demand' or
'catch-up' service. Many other channels offer a similar catch-up service to
iPlayer. These services include ITV Player, 4oD Player (Channel 4) and
Demand 5 (Five). iPlayer is available on various internet-enabled devices.
BBC iPlayer left beta and went live on 25 December 2007. on 25 June 2008,
a new-look iPlayer was lunched, originally as a beta-test version alongside the
earlier version.
The original iPlayer service was launched undergoing a five-month long trial
of five thousand broadband users. The iPlayer came under criticism for the
delay in launch, rebranding and cost to BBC license-fee payers, as no
finished product had been released after four years of development. A new,
improved BBC iPlayer service then had another very limited user trial. The
iPlayer received the approval of the BBC Trust and an open beta for Windows
XP and Windows Server 2003 was launched, where it was announced that
only a fixed number of people would be able to sign up for the service, with a
controlled increase in users over the summer.

4. Sky
Video on demand
The Sky On Demand service is one of Sky's most popular and best known
features amongst its customers in Ireland. With on demand TV services
customers are able to enjoy a huge range of shows and films, available for
viewing anytime on a variety of devices, including, home computers, tablets,
smart phones and even video games consoles. Sky On Demand allows you to
have complete control over when and what you want to watch all at the touch
of a button.
Sky Q and UHD
Sky Q and UHD is a brand from Sky and it is not just a service, but a
complete family of devices. Its goal is to completely reinvent how Sky
provides your television entertainment at home, incorporating a number of
new elements, while still providing many of the features you expect from Sky.
Personal Video Recorder
PVR stands for “Personal Video Recorder”, sometimes known as the DVR
(Digital Video Recorder). There are several advantages to using a PVR to
record your favourite TV shows: no tapes to rewind, the ability to pause live
TV, integrated programme guides, and series recording, plus a lot more
storage space than a standard VHS cassette. You can copy programmes
down onto video tape or a DVD recorder for archiving.
4K TV / Sky Q
4K or also known as UHD is a picture technology that quadruples the number
of pixels found in a full HD picture. With 4K, pixels are usually arranged in a
3,840 x 2,160 configuration, compared with the 1920x1080 you get in a full
HD TV. Some of the first Ultra HD 4K movies that are going to be published
by Sky are Ghostbusters, Angry Birds, Money Monster and Inferno.
Income
BBC
The BBC is funded by public subscription in the form of a License Fee and
license payers paid £5,66 million in fees in the latest audited financial year
(2015-2016) making the BBC the most extensive and best-funded Public
Service Broadcaster in the world.
As touched upon in the introduction, the BBC received over £5.66 billion in
license fees for the financial year 2015-2016. Added to it’s other income, such
as commercial sales of programs, merchandising, Open University payments
and EU Grants, the Corporation had a total income of over £5.166 billion.

5. All other costs aside, such as transmission, maintenance and insurance, the
BBC was left with a Spend of £2.37 billion specifically for program making for
Television and Radio.
BBC Scotland, received core funding for that year of £87.5 million, core
funding being its allocation for the production of television and radio programs
for its Scottish audience. This BBC Scotland core funding equated to only 3.7
% of the BBC’s entire program making budget.
That Scotland with 8.6% of the UK population should receive only 3.7 % of the
BBC’s program making expenditure for Scottish programming only allows
BBC Scotland to provide something akin to a skeleton media service for its
Scottish audience.
Sky
The income generated through advertising allowed the new company,
branded British Sky Broadcasting in 1990, to take advantage of the growth in
newer satellite technology. This newer technology would allow the
broadcasting service to reach more customers and ultimately provide more
channels in the Sky packages due to enhanced signal strength, and in the
long run, lower costs for both Sky and the customer. Decisive moves at this
point to generate deals with satellite companies secured BSkyB’s position in
the broadcasting world and laid the foundations for further moves into
security. One of these moves involved a deal to gain the exclusive rights for
broadcasting Premier League football. This deal became a huge development
deal that spurred Sky’s success to great heights.
As a company that has always contributed to, and thus become a leader, in
innovative and new technology Sky has consistently created channels through
which customers could purchase packages that include digital television
interactive television, HD television and, in the near future, 3D television.
Through this involvement with the visual and audio technology industry BSkyB
has become the main company to provide the most pioneering formats.
Platforms & Programs
BBC
When it comes to watching programs, BBC has no competition in this
department. As it stands the BBC website provides around 3,087,326 total
programs. All of their old programs are archived while the brand new TV
series are constantly lunched. Whether the viewer is looking for the world’s
longest running soap opera, want to know about nature, to find a track list to
add to their tracks, or wants to watch some classic comedy they’ll always find
something that will interest them, that’s why BBC is so unique because the
options are pretty much endless.
As following, the BBC not only provides a whole lot of programs whether
they’re brand new or archived, there are also some top notch quality
programs up there like the brand new Sherlock, a classical yet old wild life

6. documentary The Office, and still present till this day Top Gear. These are just
few iconic TV series that BBC provides, however there is still more.
Sky
One of the main Programs and selling points to Sky is their sport channel.
Allowing the viewer to watch all the Premier League matches. Sky Sports isn't
just a channel that showcases football and Premier League. The sport
categories varies from Tennis to Formula1 and so on, meaning there is
something special for each individual viewer. Just like BBC, Sky has many HD
channels with all genres that a potential viewer may think of.
Regulations & Controversies
BBC
1926 - General Strike Controversy
The BBC was established as the privately controlled British Broadcasting
Company in 1922. In 1926 the unions called for a General Strike and the
Conservative Government feared the outbreak of revolution, as had happened
in Russia in 1917. Labor Party politicians such as Ramsay McDonald and
Philip Snowden criticised the BBC for being pro-Government and anti-Unions;
however, throughout the strike, Reith insisted that the news bulletins report all
sides of the dispute without comment.
1930 – Commercial Radio Controversy
Because the BBC had become both a monopoly and a non-commercial entity,
it soon faced controversial competition from British subjects who were
operating leased transmitters on the continent of Europe before World War II,
to blast commercial radio programmes into the United Kingdom. John Reith
who had been given powers to dictate the cultural output of the BBC retaliated
by leading the opposition to these commercial stations. Controversy spilled
over into the press when the British government attempted to censor the
printing of their programme information. The pressure was created by the
success of these stations. By 1938 on Sundays, it was reported that 80% of
the British audience was tuning into commercial radio, rather than the non-
commercial BBC.

7. Sky
Competition and vertical integration controversy
Ofcom complained that Sky's plan to operate pay TV services
on Freeview was "generating serious consumer detriment" and the National
Consumer Council call Sky's plan "bad news for consumers," combined with
representations from BT, Setanta, Top Up TV, and Virgin Media has
caused Ofcom to launch an investigation into the "features of the market,
including control over content, ownership of distribution platforms, retail
subscriber bases and vertical integration."
Sky has repeatedly used its lawyers to lodge complaints with the soon to be
rival YouView service, considered by some to be a delaying tactic in order to
promote its own services, especially considering its failure to complain about
other services, such as Google TV.
On 13 July 2011, MP Chris Bryant stated to the House of Commons, in the
Parliamentary Debate on the Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation Bid
for BSkyB that the company was anti-competitive:
"The company has lots of technological innovation that only a robust
entrepreneur could to bring to British society, but it has also often been
profoundly anti-competitive. I believe that the bundling of channels so as to
increase the profit and make it impossible for others to participate in the
market is anti-competitive. I believe that the way in which the application
programming interface the operating system has been used has been anti-
competitive and that Sky has deliberately set about selling set-top boxes
elsewhere, outside areas where they have proper rights. If one visits a flat in
Spain where a British person lives, one finds that they mysteriously manage
to have a Sky box there even though it is registered to a house in the United
Kingdom."
Audience feedback & Criticism
BBC
2003 - Iraq and the Hutton Inquiry
The BBC was criticized for its coverage of the events before the invasion of
Iraq, in 2003. The controversy over what it described as the "sexing up" of the
case for war in Iraq by the government, led to the BBC being heavily criticized
by the Hutton Inquiry, although this finding was much disputed by the British
press, who branded it as a government whitewash. The BBC's chairman and
director general both resigned following the inquiry, and its vice-chairman
Lord Ryder made a public apology to the government, which the Liberal
Democrat Norman Baker MP described as "of such capitulation that I wanted
to throw up when I heard it”.

8. 2006 - Lebanon War
During the 2006 Lebanon War, Israeli diplomatic officials boycotted BBC news
programmes, refused interviews, and excluded BBC reporters from briefings
because Israeli officials believed the BBC's reporting was biased, stating "the
reports we see give the impression that the BBC is working on behalf of
Hezbollah instead of doing fair journalism.” Francesca Unsworth, head of BBC
News gathering, defended the coverage in an article for JewishNews.com
The feedback is usually pretty positive due to the high quality content,
advanced technology and many different channels with brand new TV shows,
however due to many controversies with Muslims, the eastern world
population is still not convinced about BBC as they don’t like the way the BBC
exposes and shows them in TV.
Over the years BBC has won many various awards for positive audience
feedback, however there still has been some negative feedback in recent
years. Mainly, the negative feedback came from the users of the forum not
liking their brand new colors and layout.
Sky
In July of 2011, former British Prime Minister claimed and convinced that
BSkyB's main owner News Corporation attempted and tried to influence
goverment policy with regards to the BBC in pursuit of the own commercial
interests. Following his argument he said,
"Mr James Murdoch, which included his cold assertion that profit not
standards was what mattered in the media, underpinned an ever more
aggressive News International and BSkyB agenda under his and Mrs
Brooks’ leadership that was brutal in its simplicity. Their aim was to cut the
BBC licence fee, to force BBC online to charge for its content, for the BBC to
sell off its commercial activities, to open up more national sporting events to
bids from BSkyB and move them away from the BBC, to open up the cable
and satellite infrastructure market, and to reduce the power of their regulator,
Ofcom. I rejected those policies."
In conclusion, I believe that BBC has a bigger variety of channels and tv
shows to offer to a potential customer rather than Sky, although Sky is more
focused on showcasing new shows where BBC's shows are more old
fashioned. Sky also does focus more on football where BBC has less rights to
do so. In this case Sky would be more appealing to me as I am a football fan
and sports fan in general. To sum it up, both BBC and Sky have their own
strenghts and weaknesses however in nowadays the customers prefer online
services like Neflix, where you can put something you fancy watching at any
time you want, you can watch your favourite shows, episode after episode
without waiting for advertisments to end, and finally you dont even have to
own a TV to watch it, online services are compatible with tablets or even
smarthphones.