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

A FUTURE FOR PUBLIC SERVICE TELEVISION
below £100 million. The Tate, for example, had
operating revenues of £92 million in 2014/15,
of which only about a third was grant-inaid.
282 As a performance company charging
for tickets, the National Theatre generates an
even higher proportion of its own revenues:
out of its turnover of £118 million, only 15%
(just under £18 million), comes from the Arts
Council. 283
None of these organisations has dedicated
funding to support digital content creation
or engagement beyond the pursuit of
their overall public service mission. Whilst
initiatives in the 2000s did attempt to
support the digitisation of collections and to
pilot new services 284 , the galleries, museums
and national performing companies have
largely had to use their core funding, topped
up with bids to the likes of the Heritage
Lottery Fund, to develop their digital
offerings.
It seems highly likely that these organisations
could do much more if they were released
into the networked world with a fraction of
the resources that we currently provide or
safeguard for public service broadcasters.
Our cultural institutions have shown they
have the creative skills but that they are also
in this for the long term. They have core
missions that embody a commitment to
specific areas of the public realm, with robust
corporate governance and detailed statutory
frameworks to back them up. 285
One potential way of getting more from these
institutions might be to get them to partner
with public service broadcasters. However,
the track record of such partnerships up to
now has not been good. Cultural institutions
talk of projects primarily conducted to
broadcasters’ priorities and timelines, their
resources, knowledge and contacts being
exploited, and their brand minimised.
Contrast that experience to what the National
Theatre has achieved by going it alone
with NT Live. Instead of partnering with a
broadcaster, the National Theatre has solved
the problems of new video production,
distribution, rights and business models on its
own and is now generating income to return
to the core business – £6 million last year,
representing 5% of its revenues. 286 Following
its own creative and business judgement, it
has also become a lead partner and platform
provider for other organisations – the recordbreaking
Cumberbatch Hamlet was not a
National Theatre production, for example.
It is hard to imagine it would have achieved
this level of creative and business success
if, seven years ago, it had looked to go into
partnership for televising plays with the BBC
or Channel 4.
Alongside the established cultural institutions,
a huge amount of small-scale, grassroots
content production is now taking place.
While there are some initiatives, for example
by Channel 4, to encourage some of this
activity, we feel there needs to be a much
larger support network and more significant
funding to harness the creativity of new or
marginalised voices who are squeezed out
of the mainstream despite deserving wider
attention.
282
Ibid., p. 89.
283
National Theatre Annual Review 2014-2015.
284
The £50m New Opportunities Fund NOF Digitise programme was launched in 1999 to support the creation of content and the digitisation
of collections in the cultural sector. The DCMS’s £15m Culture Online programme, which ran from 2002 to 2008, funded new digital services,
bringing cultural institutions together with digital media producers. The Treasury has funded discrete initiatives on an invest-to-save basis
such as The National Museums Online Learning Project.
285
Primarily the National Heritage Acts of 1980, 1983, 1997 and 2002, and the 1992 Museums and Galleries Act, which set out the governance
arrangements, public duties, and the statutory and legal obligations of the museums and galleries applying to artefacts in their collections,
and how these may be acquired, loaned and disposed of on behalf of the nation.
286
National Theatre Annual Review 2014-2015.
98