I'll add my thanks to DJNes for all his hard work (even making it easy to find the answers to individual questions which I didn't expect) and to the BS' boss for taking the time out. Communication with this forum should always be applauded (no matter what the initial motivation might have been!
)
cookiemonster mentioned the prospect of politician-type speak on the day... Well, we got a little of that, most definitely - this boss
does know how to 'Westminster' his answers! And Pedro makes some good points about the need to read between the lines (as always with this sort of thing).
There is certainly a degree of evasion and deliberate omission here and there - mostly for commercial reasons presumably. Some of the responses are hard to swallow when taken at face value. (How many people on here believe that the content strength of a show, up to compliance level, is
solely dictated by the girls' mood?! A girl has apparently never been asked to heat it up or tone it down..?! Again, I'm not talking about when she nears Ofcom boundaries.) To my mind, this one should be translated as: "There is simply not the desire or need to be 'hot' all the time." (cf. the Ofcom/courts answer which screams "Why bother?! No need.")
With hindsight some questions (particularly mine) were easily side-stepped because they were too broad. And I agree with jimmyt that all mention of the Dutch licence was strangest by it's absence - in both questions and answers.* (jimmyt did ask about it specifically but I suppose this was dropped in favour of similar, earlier, questions.)
Personally, I think the Dutch licence figures prominently in the FV question; one that the boss was particularly cagey about. That answer can be read as they are looking at utilising that license in a platform-specific way (perhaps even a FV-exclusive channel?). But we are really none the wiser, even now, on this, perhaps the most important, content issue on the channels atm!
On a different topic, I find it particularly sad that they have very few old recordings of FTA transmissions! Short-sighted? I think so. Surely it would cost very little to store this stuff now and they could have been encoded, as a job lot, with the pre-recorded stuff. (This answer also does not bode well for other channel's holding onto recordings of their output.) Again, I think they were not kept because of contract details over re-use personally.
Overall though, I think it was a worthwhile exercise, pulled off with aplomb, but some potentially juicy info did slip through the cracks...
Hopefully, we will see more of this kind event again in the future.
* Working under "different regulators" was mentioned.