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Why the BBC needs you to think it's good value
The BBC holds a privileged position in the UK broadcasting market. As the beneficiary of your TV license fees, the Beeb picked up £3.7 billion last year from Brits, helping it fund its TV, radio, and web services. Some -- notably its competitors -- argue this is unfair, and perhaps because of this, the broadcaster is going on the offensive (or, perhaps, defensive) by reiterating exactly what it offers for that money.
Cocktail 4.3 Leopard edition released
It's Cocktail time yet again -- the intrepid folks at Maintain are updating the Leopard version to 4.3, and bringing more utility than ever to the already extremely popular and versatile Unix function and OS X tweaking app. The new version adds the ability to clear harmful files off the system (including some nasty trojans), lets you clear out the CrashReporter and HungReporter logs, and fixes a few QuickTime compatbility issues as well.The update is highly recommended for all users of the Leopard Edition, and available right now from Maintain's website. If you haven't yet taken the plunge on getting access to all of the weird and wonderful Unix widgets running inside your computer -- everything from cron jobs and maintenance tasks to network optimization -- the app itself is available for a single-user license fee of $14.95. Considering all of the things this app does (not to mention how often they update), that's a bargain. For those elite geeks who feel like going free of charge and foregoing the pleasant interface to the UNIX underpinnings of Mac OS X, you can accomplish some of the same maintenance and cleanup tasks with CLIX.
Copyright Royalty Board sets new satellite radio license fees
It's not nearly as hotly-debated as the change to the webcasting rates, but our nation's esteemed Copyright Royalty Board has just issued a new set of license fees for satellite broadcasters -- also known as Sirius and XM. The new rates come after a year of legal wrangling -- the main point of contention was hashing out what revenue to measure to determine the license fees, and it looks like the broadcasters won on this one -- advertising and subscriptions count, but not hardware sales and data services. That said, the rates still look like they're pretty fair, all around: the six-year plan has the companies paying six percent of applicable revenues through 2008, 6.5 percent in 2009, seven percent in 2010, 7.5 percent in 2011, and eight percent in 2012. Of course, hopefully by then that pesky merger will finally be completed, so the rates will have to be adjusted further, but it's nice to know that the tunes are going to keep coming for a while longer.[Via OrbitCast]
