The Obamacare exchanges that cost hundreds of millions of dollars and didn’t work are recent examples of an apparently universal principle: government bureaucracies are ridiculously slow, costly, and inept.  MacRumors reports on a similar phenomenon across the pond:

Following the unveiling of the new Apple TV back in September, United Kingdom-based public service broadcaster BBC told fans on Twitter that there were "no plans currently" to develop an iPlayer app for the new platform. While the broadcaster has backtracked slightly since that time, more recently stating it doesn't "have any info to give" on the topic, with the launch of the Apple TV right around the corner, a couple of Dorset-based developers have taken the task into their own hands to prove that the app can be made with relative ease. (snip)

screenshot from proof of concept iPlayer app

Now, a pair of developers from Bournemouth, Dorset in the United Kingdom -- Matt Cheetham and Phillip Caudell -- have used a recent hack event to prove Apple TV support for BBC iPlayer could be implemented fairly easily by the broadcaster. (snip)

Most impressively, the duo planned, coded, and completed the app in under nine hours at the "Hack to the Future" event in Bournemouth over the weekend. As they note in the GitHub post, the two won't be submitting the app to the App Store, but they wanted to showcase "what can be achieved with the tvOS platform and the BBC's amazing content."

The app we're publishing here was built in just under 9 hours at a hack event to prove it could be done. It's by no means complete or perfect, and it's very much a proof of concept. It's our hope the BBC will release an official app for Apple TV, as they've made iPlayer available on a wide range of other set-top boxes and Smart TVs.

The BBC’s notorious bureaucracy is so cumbersome, slow-moving, and fixated on endless meetings that the network itself created a comedy series satirizing it.  W1A is available on Netflix and features Hugh Bonneville, famous as Lord Crawley on Downton Abbey, as the BBC’s “head of values.”  Of course, the series pulls its punches and never mentions the Jimmy Savile scandal or touches on the deep leftist and anti-Israel bias of the BBC.

Lesson: Two guys without funding can do in 9 hours what a multi-billion-dollar government agency said it couldn’t do for months.  As Newt Gingrich used to joke, if we left technological innovation to the government, we’d still be using vacuum tubes.

Hat tip: "Charles Martel"