A FUTURE FOR PUBLIC SERVICE TELEVISION CONTENT AND PLATFORMS IN A DIGITAL WORLD

CONTENT AND PLATFORMS IN A DIGITAL WORLD
decades into the internet age, suggests either
a failure of imagination, of sustained R & D, or
of institutional commitment – or all three.
New normative thinking can help to combat
this state of affairs, framing new challenges
for PSM. We therefore propose new linked
principles: the obligation to animate
participation and new creative practices, and
to curate and disseminate the results.
Tony Hall has spoken of partnership as a new
principle in a digital environment, 70 while
the white paper talks of the need for the
BBC to improve its partnerships with other
organisations. 71 However, this commitment
should not be limited to the opening up
of the BBC, or PSM more generally, to
partnering only with established (and, in
some cases, elite) cultural bodies such as
the Royal Opera House, the British Museum
and the British Film Institute. Partnership
must extend to very local engagements with
small-scale and amateur producers: they
too should be invited to participate in the
PSM ecology, answering also to the need for
greater decentralisation in media and cultural
production. This is what lies behind our
commitment to a new fund for digital content
providers that we discuss further in
Chapter 7.
The spectrum of production and services
would therefore range from the fully
professional to more ‘amateur’ practices:
all matter today, and PSM in the digital
era is about brokering partnerships and
participation across this spectrum. Emulating
the long tail model using the distributive
powers of public digital platforms will allow
PSM to open out, boosting its function of
animating the creative economy.
We want to emphasise the importance of
partnership, animation, participation and
curation. This would help to counter the
current lack of engagement with the niche
possibilities of the digital and stimulate the
curation of low budget and experimental
content – film, comedy, documentary, reality –
on public portals that offer creatives a higher
profile. The PSM ecology should involve
deep reflection about socially and culturally
enriching digital interventions of this kind
that have the potential to empower, by vastly
increasing the diversity of voices in the
(three-way) public sphere, while contributing
to, and even cementing, the growth of local,
regional and national production hubs.
A further proposition is that the PSM
should intervene in and reshape what have
become entirely commercial, in some cases
globally oligopolistic digital markets. Under
the prevailing ‘market impact’ discourse,
obsessed as it is with short-term impacts
on competitor revenues and profits, such
interventions are almost unthinkable. But
our argument is that, if they derive from
PSM’s evolving normative principles – of
independence, universality, citizenship, quality
(which should now include innovation and
risk-taking) and diversity – then interventions
in digital markets are justified. Indeed, the
more significant question is why they have
been ruled out. When designing such digital
interventions in the media ecology, PSM
should meet the same criteria as PSB before
it: they are justified when they complement or
raise the game of commercial services.
70
Tony Hall, speech at the Science Museum on the future vision of the BBC, September 7, 2015.
71
Department for Media, Culture and Sport, A BBC for the future: a broadcaster of distinction, 2016, p. 66.
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