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

A FUTURE FOR PUBLIC SERVICE TELEVISION
It is hard to sustain the case that other media
competitors, particularly in TV, have been
damaged as a result of the BBC’s activities.
The commercial TV operators compete with
each other for advertising revenues, not
with the BBC. In fact, they have generally
welcomed the BBC’s model, as they get to
keep a larger slice of the advertising cake.
Nevertheless, concerned that the BBC
might be ‘crowding out’ its competitors,
the government commissioned an analysis
from Oliver & Ohlbaum that examined the
BBC’s decision to run popular programmes
at the same as ITV. The study concluded that
“scheduling on BBC One is probably reducing
the relative profitability of drama series in
particular, with ITV drama viewing down
around six to eight per cent when clashes
occur.” 136 We believe, however, that the
government’s proposal that the BBC should,
from now on, schedule more ‘sensitively’
is both an unnecessary concession to ITV
pressure given the latter’s financial health
and a misunderstanding of the positive
benefits for audiences of competition “in
good programming rather than competition
for numbers” 137 between the two main
broadcasters.
Looking beyond TV, newspapers now
compete in a newly direct way with the
BBC through their websites, and the BBC’s
presence as a free source of news and
information makes it hard for newspapers to
charge for access. But in general they have
not tried to; they have preferred to follow
a strategy of keeping their sites free to
generate high-volume traffic. The problem is
that consumers are moving away from print
and are reluctant to pay for online products
unless they are truly specialist – a situation
that can hardly be blamed on the BBC.
Surely, the major threat to the newspaper
and magazine industry is not a BBC website
that may, at times, elide its news and features
output with an insufficiently clear sense of
public purpose but the huge growth of online
competitors like Facebook, Huffington Post
and BuzzFeed.
In the case of regional and local news media,
there is a strong argument for the BBC to be
stepping in much more vigorously through
the creation of partnerships and content
sharing. The white paper recognises this and
proposes, for example, a ‘Local Public Sector
Reporting Service’ 138 where BBC journalists
would provide content for others to use.
We support this in principle as long as the
service is not used simply to underwrite the
operations of commercial news monopolies
that used to provide this content as a matter
of routine and that have withdrawn from this
responsibility solely for cost reasons. Indeed,
we hope that the fund is structured in such a
way to prioritise the nurturing of relationships
between the BBC and emerging sources
of local news including hyperlocal blogs,
independent media outlets and new local
news startups. 139 The fund should not operate
as a corporate subsidy to existing commercial
media companies.
Where the BBC does have a case to answer
is in matters of creative ambition and risktaking.
There are definitely areas where
it could do better: in hard-hitting current
affairs, searching documentaries and
groundbreaking, impartial news which was,
after all, recently criticised by its former
economics editor as being overly cautious
and “obsessed” with right-wing newspaper
138
BBC white paper, 2016, p. 74.
139
See Damian Radcliffe, Where Are We Now? UK hyperlocal media and community journalism in 2015, Nesta, 2015.
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