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

Welcome
Television is leading a charmed
existence. After all, it is no longer
supposed to exist. With the rise of
the internet and the widespread
availability of digital platforms,
what is the point in the 21st century
of a 20th century technology that
broadcasts from a central point
out to millions of viewers who
are increasingly preoccupied with
making, circulating and consuming
non-broadcast content on their
smartphones and iPads?
How can television with its baggage of
‘mass audiences’ and one-way transmissions
compete with a digital universe that
embodies the more fragmented and
decentred nature of the way we live today?
The American writer George Gilder noticed
this development back in 1994, just after the
emergence of the web. He predicted that
“TV will die because it affronts human nature:
the drive to self-improvement and autonomy
that lifted the race from the muck and offers
the only promise for triumph in our current
adversities.” 3
But TV hasn’t died. In fact it has stubbornly
refused to disappear in the face of the white
heat of the digital revolution. Contrary to
what people like Gilder predicted, the internet
hasn’t killed television but actually extended
its appeal – liberating it from the confines
of the living room where it sat unchallenged
for half a century and propelling it, via
new screens, into our bedrooms, kitchens,
toilets, offices, buses, trains and streets.
Television has both grown and shrunk: it
adorns the walls of our shared spaces but is
simultaneously mobile and portable. Where
do you not now find television?
Even more puzzling than the resilience of
the television experience is the fact that in
the UK, the heartland of creative innovation
and deregulated markets, the vast majority
of the content consumed is provided by a
group of people who are described as ‘public
service broadcasters’ and whose motivation
is not reducible to profits alone but instead
to a shared commitment to pursue a range
of political, social and cultural objectives.
This too has been dismissed as a project
without a future. “Public service broadcasting
will soon be dead,” argued the former ITV
chief executive Richard Eyre in 1999. “It
will soon be dead because it relies on an
active broadcaster and a passive viewer.” 4
Yet millions of “passive viewers” continue to
consume, on average, just under four hours
a day of material that combines, in Eyre’s
language, “the wholesome, healthy and
carefully crafted” with the “easily digestible,
pre-packaged, and the undemanding.”
One of the reasons for these apocalyptic
visions of TV’s imminent demise is the
confusion between television as a specific
technology and its status as a cultural form.
The media commentator Michael Wolff
highlights the frequent conflation between
TV “as a business model”, which he argues is
incredibly healthy, and TV as a “distribution
channel” whose future is far less certain. He
concludes that there is little reason to believe
that “people will stop watching TV, even if
they stop watching the TV.” 5
3
George Gilder, Life After Television: The Coming Transformation of Media and American Life, London: W.W. Norton, 1994, p.16
4
Richard Eyre, MacTaggart Memorial Lecture, August 28, 1999.
5
Michael Wolff, Television is the New Television: The Unexpected Triumph of Old Media in the Digital Age, New York: Penguin, 2015, p. 28.
7