What is public service media?

The government’s latest media green paper proposes prominence for trusted news on online platforms (separately to potential prominence for public service media content). This involves a collision of totally differently regulated parts of the media landscape.

Prominence could take different forms and include different providers. At present, news is a small part of platform viewing, but many types of providers engage in that space, for a range of public service or commercial reasons.

Defining ‘quality news’ is extremely difficult; designating providers is almost as tricky. There is also the matter of deciding who decides what news to promote.

Broadcasters accept the need to ‘meet audiences where they are’ on video-sharing and social/entertainment platforms. In practice this means full episodes where they think viewing is likely incremental, as well as multi-format ‘fandom-building’ content strategies arranged around core IP.

Thriving on platforms requires playing by platform rules. There are sophisticated strategies emerging that straddle marketing and the monetisable distribution of new formats. 

For most, this activity remains fundamentally secondary and supplemental to core offerings. There are concerns around the ability to fund the kind of premium content broadcasters and traditional studios produce via digital platforms, without entirely reconfiguring what it is they do.

The BBC has been doing more with less since at least 2010. Since then, licence fee income has fallen faster in real terms (28%) than its cost cutting (15%) can keep up with.

The funding base underlying the BBC must be widened, both to ensure sustainable funding levels, and to ensure the true universality of that structure in the face of changing consumption habits.

Maintaining the status quo would guarantee a meaningfully smaller BBC, with more cuts to content and services each year that goes by—to the detriment of the UK public and the wider media sector. Waiting another ten years is not an option.