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

A FUTURE FOR PUBLIC SERVICE TELEVISION
It follows that any major change to the BBC’s
purpose, size, funding, or constitutional
arrangements would have a significant and
potentially destabilising impact on the whole
ecology around it.
There are various ways in which the BBC
affects – largely positively, in our view – the
rest of the ecology in which it sits. First
and foremost, its commitment to highquality,
challenging programming has a
virtuous effect on its competitors, by setting
standards and thereby improving the overall
quality of output. ITV’s aspiration to make
high quality UK-originated drama is bolstered
by creative competition with the publicly
funded BBC, for example. It knows that many
of its audience will have watched drama on
the BBC and will be making comparisons.
Sky’s commitment to arts programming is
hard to imagine without the example of the
BBC.
The BBC is also a major commissioner from
the UK’s flourishing independent television
production sector. 122 It has strong links to and
supports the cultural sector and the wider
creative industries. It encourages public
engagement too, stimulating creative activity
at grassroots level.
The BBC also acts – or should act – as a
training ground for talent and as a laboratory
for ideas that may not automatically find a
place in commercial TV. That talent and those
ideas can then flow into the commercial
sector – and back again. Because of its
guaranteed funding and because it does not
have to make a profit, the BBC can afford
to take risks. It might well be argued that it
takes far too few; but the main point is that
it can take risks in the way that commercial
operators find it hard to justify.
The BBC has devised a three-stage
‘transmission mechanism’ to describe the
positive economic effects of its activities.
The ‘first-round’ effects are those directly
resulting from investment in content and
services – spending money on programmes
and the technology that allows them to be
made and distributed. ‘Second-round’ effects
include the licensing of formats and the
positive impact that the iPlayer has had on
the growth of the video-on-demand market.
Nurturing talent and building up creative
‘clusters’ in areas such as Salford are part of
the ‘third-round’ spillover effects, which are
harder to measure. 123
The BBC has attempted to quantify how
much it contributes to the wider economy in
a series of reports. For 2011/12, it estimated
that its ‘gross value added’ – or the value
generated for the UK economy as a result of
its activities – could be put at £8.3 billion. In
other words, for every £1 of licence fee spend,
£2 of economic value was generated. 124 The
BBC said that in 2013/14 it had invested
around £1.2 billion of licence fee income
into the creative industries outside the BBC,
with around £450 million on “small and
micro-sized creative businesses”, supporting
more than 2,700 creative suppliers. It
invested a further £1.5 billion outside the
creative industries in the UK, largely on
technology supporting content creation
and distribution. 125 According to media
122
See the BBC’s Performance against public commitments 2014/15.
123
See James Heath, ‘The BBC’s role in the creative economy’, February 5, 2015.
124
BBC, The Economic Value of the BBC: 2011/12, 2013, p. 4.
125
James Heath, ‘The BBC’s role…’
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