Public Value
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) www.bbc.co.uk
Generalist BBC1 (SD+HD), BBC2, BBC3, BBC HD
Documentary BBC4
News / Business BBC NEWS
Parliamentary BBC PARLIAMENT
Children CBBC, CBEEBIES
33,2 % Market share
Channel 4 Television CH4 (UKIB) www.channel4.com
Generalist CHANNEL 4 + S4C, CHANNEL 4 +1 E4, E4 HD, E4+1, MORE4, MORE4 +1
Movies FILM4, FILM4 +1
Music 4MUSIC
11,5 % Market share
Sianel Pedwar Cymru S4C (UKIB) www.s4c.co.uk
Generalist S4C
0,1 % Market share
Third, it needs to be acknowledged that just as with all other forms of programming, there is no single »mainstream« form of entertainment. The genre covers a wide range of formats and styles, targeted at a diverse range of audiences. Consequently, it cannot be expected that viewers’ needs would be satisfied by offering them just talent shows or reality television programmes, in spite of the fact that they have a potential to attract large audiences. There are several niches in the entertainment genre that are not produced by commercial broadcasters because of the small sizes of their audiences or their limited commercial exploitability. Thus, Public Service Media need to maintain diversity within the genre by catering for minority interests, tastes and groups. Finally, while Reithian values have been gradually fading into the background in the public service idea, the idea that entertainment can act as a vehicle to promote social and cultural goals should not be considered outdated. Quite the opposite: the evolution of the culture of television has seen programming crossing the oncerigid genre boundaries more regularly than ever before. Information, education and entertainment are no longer disconnected from each other, but programmes can no longer be positioned into a single domain. In terms of public service objectives, this should be considered an opportunity, as the popularity of entertainment provides a great potential to reach mass audiences. Political satire, for instance, has potential to maintain the health of democracy by performing several functions of the fourth estate and increase citizens’ interest in political matters. Factual programming provides an interesting case to consider with this respect too: the emergence of the factual entertainment genre—while commonly sneered upon by critical scholars—can be used for the purposes of information and education. The future of Public Service Media is dependent on two key factors: its political legitimacy and popular support. Political justification derives from its ability to perform the four aforementioned functions in its programming, while popular support can be gained through making the content appealing to the audiences. Public Service Media need to balance between these two elements in their entertainment programming in order to maintain their legitimacy in the digital media age. •
U n i t e d K i n gdom / R o y a u m e - U n i / V e r e i n i gt e s K ö n i gr e i c h
United Kingdom
»MyBBC«, in the Digital Media Age Lizzie Jackson Ravensbourne
At the annual October, 2013 Media Conference in Salford, in the north of the UK, Victoria Jaye, the BBC’s Head of iPlayer, noted that the biggest challenge facing the BBC (and other public service media) in the future is likely to be »findability«. What Jaye meant by that was solving the issue of how to maintain the corpus of public service content as it is increasingly delivered in many different ways, at different times, via different devices and platforms. This article explores how the BBC, and other Public Service Media, might address the issue of how to remain at the forefront of the public’s media choices, in the age of Internet Protocol-delivered content and services. In the 1990’s the BBC experimented with providing personal webpages for the public titled »MyBBC« on the BBC’s website (www.bbc.co.uk). This was a personal portal through which audiences could access BBC content they regularly enjoyed; a kind of online bookmarking tool. »MyBBC« failed as the internet was not fast enough to provide anything more than a personal list of favourites, it was not much more than an online version of the BBC’s highly popular printed listings magazine »The Radio Times«. At a recent visit to a BBC Research and Development department in December, 2013 (interestingly shared with researchers from University College, London) I noted a list of priorities for the BBC’s research
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Public value REPORT 2013/14
department, displayed in all rooms and on all public noticeboards. Priority number one is the continued expansion of the BBC’s iPlayer. Second on the list is the development of a new service provisionally titled »MyBBC«. The idea from the 1990’s has—it seems— re-emerged. Providing a personalised BBC is likely to now be more engaging in the era of social media where commenting, »liking«, forwarding, and even creating additional content in connection with television programming is easy for audiences. The iPlayer has been a huge success for the BBC, so much so that internet service providers in the UK complained, on its re-launch in 2008, to the BBC that the public’s demand for content via the iPlayer was taking up most of the British internet bandwidth. PlusNet, an internet service provider in Sheffield said the iPlayer was responsible for »more than 5 % of the traffic on its systems« (The Guardian, 2008). Ofcom, the UK’s media watchdog, also suggested that internet service providers may need to invest more than £800m from 2008 onwards merely to keep up with such developments. Encouraging as the growing popularly of the BBC’s iPlayer may be for Public Service Broadcasters globally, it is still largely the equivalent of television, in a box, but online. By that I mean that it is a »traditional« form of television, which uses the internet merely as a delivery mechanism. The length of the programmes remains the
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