"Our main concern always was to take an ethical stance and to do no harm to any revenue streams of programme makers or broadcasters," Roger Evans told the BBC.
TV firms get an endless stream of cheap programmes.
Instead, the controllers of main terrestrial channels saw it as their duty to provide a steady stream of arts programmes and even classic drama to a large, mainstream audience.
We're still a month and a half away from Red Nose Day and it's already beginning to look as if the prime purpose of this year's Comic Relief is to provide the BBC with a steady stream of cookery programmes to fill the schedules.
She cites a stream of books, television programmes, and articles which she says are significantly responsible for portraying state education in an unfavourable light.
There have been other important exhibitions about Pompeii and an endless stream of books and TV programmes, so you may think you know what is coming next.
Placeshifting makes it harder to charge consumers for new streaming video and mobile-TV services, for example; why pay extra for a limited selection of programmes when you can stream TV from home right to your computer or handset?
The government has introduced some new funding streams to help schools fund these sort of programmes.
The launch offering features 7,000 hours of programmes which can be streamed or downloaded via PC or Mac to watch offline.
Call it stream-of-consciousness shopping.
From September existing customers, who now pay $9.99 per month for DVDs through the post (getting one disc at a time) and unlimited streaming of mostly older programmes and films, will instead be offered DVDs and streaming for $7.99 each.
