Presumably the BBC outbid other British channels in a competitive bidding process. I suspect that broadcasters in the rest of the world know that 20 minutes of commercials per hour is unacceptable, so they don't bid as much as our networks. EDIT: The only source I could find indicates that the BBC paid about $100 million for broadcast rights to these games. That's 1/10th of what NBC paid, or about 1/2 of the American fees on a per capita basis.

In many countries (including the United Kingdom) the amount of commercials that can be broadcasted per hour on terrestrial broadcast is limited by law or other regulations. The UK is special in that the biggest broadcasters (BBC, ITV, Channel 4) are all publicly owned.

Edit: as others have pointed out, ITV is not publicly owned, but Channel 4 (and obviously BBC) are.

The US used to be one of those countries until Ronald Reagan signed a bill removing restrictions.

"June 28, 1984: President Ronald Reagan signs 'The Cable Communications Act' into law. During his first term in office, President Ronald Reagan approved "The Cable Communications Act," groundbreaking legislation that, among other things, lifted time restrictions on television advertisements. The stage was now set for the long-form infomercial."

http://news.yahoo.com/crazy-tv-products-evolution-infomercia...

I would also add Sky as one of the biggest broadcasters, certainly by revenue. They are commercial pay TV with some advertising broadcasting on their own satellite platform but with some of their channels also available on cable and terrestrial. Not everyone has the Sky channels.

Yes BBC is fully public corporation of it's own unique type (Corporation by Royal Charter - I think). Largely license fee funded with the rest coming from its commercial arm selling content (mostly overseas) and also books, magazines and back catalogue content in the UK.

Channel 4 is a normal company but government owned. Funded by ad revenue.

ITV is mostly ad funded and fully commercial. It used to be a group of regional companies (a bit like US affiliates) but they have all merged to one big company.

Due to my job, I work a lot with these broadcasters, especially Channel 4. From what I can tell, even though they are commercially funded, the folks over there in Horseferry Road try to take their "publicly owned" status seriously and try to act with the "public interest" (whatever that means) in mind. For example, I know that at least unofficially, they try really hard to help and support small, independent producers.

ITV is not publicly owned. Channel 4 is though [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Four_Television_Corpora...

>The UK is special in that the biggest broadcasters (BBC, ITV, Channel 4) are all publicly owned.

No, no, no. Only the BBC is 'publicly owned' (e: ok and channel 4 is although commercial- the point was definitely not ITV). They do have some regulatory requirements, though.

Do tell us who you think owns Channel 4.

I believe that it is the last year of a pan-European deal between the IOC and the EBU/Eurovision which is the club of largely public service broadcasters from across Europe (quite widely defined not just the EU).

The BBC has just done its own deal for the next few Olympics with the IOC.

I believe the BBC gets it by default being the state broadcaster.

How much is the fee? I suspect if given the choice between fee or commercials, many would choose the fee. Sadly that choice doesn't exist here (in the US) :/

Most people do both in the US, don't they? Paying for cable and still getting ads.

When they brought in one of the early cable TV systems in Australia, I think a selling point was that they had very few commercials. That didn't last long, and these days it feels like they have more than free-to-air... So I don't bother - free-to-air and the internet is enough.

Per [1] the fee appears to be £145.50 a year, or roughly $229.10 USD according to Wolfram Alpha.

[1]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/insidethebbc/whoweare/licen...

In Germany it’s €215.76 per year, so about $266. Similar, but I can’t help and feel that value for money is worse here. There is some real cool stuff the BBC does that just does not exist in Germany.

But it seems that the Olympics will get pretty great coverage, also on the web. (There were, e.g., streams with and without commentary available tonight.)

£145.50 (US$228) per year. About £0.40 (US$0.65) per day.

Excellent value in my opinion.

And if you don't pay, you'll get regular visits from TV licensing agents:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_Uni...

Which you can completely ignore, because the agents are just standard salesmen really - they have no special rights. It also costs you money to report that you don't have a TV, so the simplest way is just throw the notices straight into the bin.

(Unless you do have a TV of course)

* If you don't pay and watch live TV.

You can choose not to have a TV and not pay the license. Without the license you can still watch BBC iPlayer (although not the live bit).

Believe me, you still get visits and threatening letters from the TV licencing people.

You just need to fill in the form at https://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/no-licence-needed/ every three years. I've done that before and it's stopped the letters.

It didn't work for me, they still sent threatening letters every few weeks that all but accused me of lying.

I love the BBC (even though I didn't always own a TV) but in my experience the TV licencing company are bullying scum.

That's a whole lot less than paying for cable to get ESPN

Most of the sports channels aren't covered by the licence fee, you still have to pay for cable (or Satellite) for them. The Olympics are one of the few exceptions.

I don't find it so great; it's more than double what I pay for Netflix or Lovefilm, and I seem to be getting more use out of them overall. There's some good stuff on BBC but not that many shows I'm that excited about.

Also, iplayer is not great. The whole business of having to watch shows within a week is, frankly, pretty lame.

While you may think the license is good value. If we have a TV in the UK and watch it we have to pay the license. The fee is for the BBC channels alone. I can't choose to watch commercial TV only and not pay the fee. Simple solution is to scramble the BBC. But they're too used to getting their grubby little paws on money by some kind of state extortion. I'll take a guess and say that I watch a max of about 2 hours of BBC TV a week if that. That's hardly fair.

I'd rather the choice to opt out of the BBC and still watch TV.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/insidethebbc/whoweare/licen...

Perhaps it will be worth the fee if I have children (kids TV.) I love BBC radio 4 though. The radio should work out as far better value for money, but quite how they calculate it to be an 1/8th of the TV costs is a bit of a puzzle! They must be throwing money at presenters or something.

Here's a good breakdown of the license fee:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/jul/12/bbc-spen...

Why aren't there more startups -- or established channels -- offering a cable channel at 2x-3x the price, with no commercials?

A lot of people probably can't afford it, but for those who can, it seems like it'd be an interesting option to have.

Well the main reason for startups not doing this is that broadcasting (at least of new content) is a land of exclusive deals over varying size territories. In order to offer content you would essentially have two options:

1) Bid national scale against the big players for enough content to fill your channel which wouldn't be within reach of anything I would normally picture as a start up.

OR

2) Make arrangements with each of the current local exclusive rights holders and have Geographic holes where you couldn't make the deals (which might mean different content is blacked out in each area).

The best chance might be if you could start in one large broadcast market where you could find an amenable local broadcast partner AND cable company. I wouldn't expect it to be easy or profitable though.

Could established players do it? Maybe although it might depend on the exact structure of their current deals.

DVRs have already sewn up most of that demand, with fewer licensing/channel conflict issues.

Does PBS have adverts?

I was under the impression US networks are anything but free? I mean, guys like Viacom pay our cable companies for potential access to our eyeballs here in Holland. I heard they actually get paid by cable companies in the US. For jersey shore .. with adds. Way too many adds.

Now, i dont know how much money ads bring to the table, but they could double my cable bill, (from 10 to 20 euros), if it would all be ad free.