Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-26975268-20130201045831/@comment-2092102-20130206223517

SmallerOnTheOutside wrote: Wasn't it at least originally a proper branch? In the same way as HMV? I don't believe so - the BBC proper is a publicly funded by the British public and government and is controlled by a charter - they must serve British public interests, not commercial purposes.

As such any commercial activity (including vids/dvds and anything with ad breaks) is generally controlled by the subsidiary company BBC enterprises/worldwide (as the government wouldn't allow the British public to foot the bill of a commercial venture) and is pretty much independent of the BBC proper. The decision that the BBC proper would not pay for or be directly associated with worldwide enterprises seems to have been taken around a decade before BBCA even existed.

That only took a little research ;-)