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

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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…’ . 52
CONTENT AND PLATFORMS IN A DIGITAL WORLD economists Patrick Barwise and Robert Picard, without the existence of the BBC, there would be a 5-25% drop in total content investment and an even bigger decline (25- 50%) in original UK content. 126 Little wonder that the BBC is so regularly described as “the cornerstone” of the UK’s creative sector. The BBC’s mission Under its current charter, the BBC’s main object is the promotion of its six public purposes. These are: • Sustaining citizenship and civil society; • Promoting education and learning; • Stimulating creativity and cultural excellence; • Representing the UK, its nations, regions, and communities; • Bringing the UK to the world and the world to the UK; • In promoting its other purposes, helping to deliver to the public the benefit of emerging communications technologies and services. 127 The government has now suggested scrapping the sixth public purpose. We believe that this is a mistake. The BBC has made a huge contribution in the field of innovation – from the development of colour TV to the iPlayer more recently – and we would propose that this purpose should be retained in order that the public benefits from emerging technologies. As framed, the sixth purpose clearly extends beyond Digital Switchover (DSO) and it is therefore somewhat disingenuous to claim that this purpose has been removed because switchover has now been “successfully completed”. 128 The white paper also recommends the revision of the remaining purposes largely in order to make sure that the BBC better serves diverse audiences and lands the corporation with a responsibility “to inform, educate and entertain distinctively” 129 – issues that we shall return to shortly. Yet, if there is a guiding principle behind these purposes and what the BBC is really about, it is universality. As is the case with the National Health Service and the state education system, this means both that the BBC is universally accessible to all and that it aspires to provide a space (or a series of spaces) to which all people are equally free to enter. Sometimes it aims to bring virtually the entire nation together but more often than this, it brings some of us together some of the time. This is a harder trick to pull off than ever before. In the past, in a world of three or four channels, large audience figures were not hard to come by. The explosion in channels and on-demand viewing (as detailed in the previous chapter), as well as new claims on especially younger people’s leisure time – not least the limitless pleasures and distractions of the internet – and a trend towards social atomisation have combined to undermine the collective viewing experience that was such a hallmark of the late 20th century. 126 Patrick Barwise and Robert Picard, What If There Were No BBC Television? The Net Impact on UK Viewers. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, 2014 127 BBC royal charter, 2006, paragraph 4. 128 BBC white paper, 2016, p. 89. 129 ibid., p. 28, our emphasis. 53
Page 1 and 2: A FUTURE FOR PUBLIC SERVICE TELEVIS
Page 3 and 4: Contents Foreword by David Puttnam
Page 5 and 6: To instruct democracy, if possible
Page 7 and 8: Welcome Television is leading a cha
Page 9 and 10: CONTENT AND PLATFORMS IN A DIGITAL
Page 11 and 12: PSB channels 71.9% All other channe
Page 15 and 16: Why television matters Television i
Page 19 and 20: 1982 1990s 2012 The BBC-ITV duopoly
Page 23 and 24: Time for action Today’s policymak
Page 29 and 30: Basic principles At the core of pre
Page 39 and 40: The multichannel revolution Perhaps
Page 51: The BBC For most people, the BBC is
Page 67 and 68: Channel 4 If the BBC is the most im
Page 71 and 72: Only 8% of Channel 4’s total spen
Page 79 and 80: ITV and Channel 5 The focus of atte
Page 85 and 86: The changing face of ITV 1993-2002
Page 91 and 92: New sources of public service conte
Page 103 and 104:
Television and diversity We have ea
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CONTENT AND PLATFORMS IN A DIGITAL
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THE PEOPLE SHOULD BE TELEVISED If t
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Nations and Regions Public service
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Content diversity One of the key wa
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Sports content now accounts for som
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Talent development and training In
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Conclusion Television is changing.
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Recommendations General The UK’s
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Appointing the BBC board Sir David
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APPLICATION OF THE NOLAN PRINCIPLES
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BAFTA members’ survey delivered i
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Public service broadcasting, public
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Inquiry events Do we still need pub
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Acknowledgements Inquiry Report Con
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A FUTURE FOR PUBLIC SERVICE TELEVISION CONTENT AND PLATFORMS IN A DIGITAL WORLD

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