Last week the Government published its White Paper about the future of the BBC. After well over two years of debate and argument, the White Paper represents a considered view about what the BBC should do over the period from today to 2016 and how it should be organised.
Licence-fee funding is retained. The BBC Governors are replaced by a new body, the BBC Trust. The BBC’s traditional public purposes – modern versions of Reith’s original inform, educate, entertain – are joined by another which is to help build digital Britain. That role, the Government says, is ‘unique among broadcasters’.
The White Paper, in other words, is a strong endorsement of the continued centrality of the BBC, not just in national cultural life, but in the development and role-out of the next phase of broadcasting’s technological future.
But I should begin by explaining why the BBC got involved in on demand in the first place.
The BBC model is conceptually very simple. The public give us the licence-fee. In return we give them – or try to give them – outstanding, distinctive content. Historically, it was quite difficult to get the right content in front of the right licence-payer. They weren’t in, or they were watching or listening to another channel, or they didn’t know about the programme or know how much they’d value it if they did catch it. Broadcasting is what economists call an information good: consumers don’t know the value of it until they’ve consumed it so it’s difficult to allocate efficiently.
On demand changes all of this. It means you can potentially consume BBC content at a time and on a device which suits you. Nor does a guillotine descend the moment after transmission: that brilliant programme you missed last night and which you only learned about when you read this morning’s review in the paper is no longer lost forever or subject to the inevitably intermittent repeats strategy of our linear networks. You can read the review and then watch the programme.
On demand is about making existing content far more available to the people who paid for it in the first place. It’s a new means to achieve an end which has always been part of our mission.
MyBBCPlayer is sometimes talked about as if it was a major new departure for the BBC. I do think it marks a watershed – a major expansion of choice and functionality and a recognition that on demand is going to become an important – perhaps ultimately the most important – way in which we will put great content in front of the public.
Our Radio Player has led the charge. Last year there were around 100 million requests for content from this part of our website, in addition to many, many millions of requests for live streaming of our radio networks. We’ve also been trialling downloads of radio programmes for use on the ipod and other mobile devices. In January this year there were 1.9 million requests for podcast content with BBC titles frequently dominating the overall podcasting top ten in the UK.
We also deliver on demand programmes to the nearly two million households in the UK who already have on demand services delivered via cable and other means to their TV sets. The core of our offering here to date is up to 50 hours of free catch-up TV from the past seven days of the schedules. Again this new way of accessing content is proving popular with users. Of those customers who use NTL’s on demand service, for instance, around 65% are taking advantage of our Pick of the Week catch-up content.
Finally on our website and with broadband users in mind we’ve been experimenting with various kinds of both premiere and catch-up service. Live web streaming and the premiering of individual programmes was built into the BBC Three proposition – and formed part of the consent from the Secretary of State. So we’ve tried premieres and catch-up opportunities for BBC Three comedies like The Mighty Boosh, Nighty Night and The Thick Of It. More recently, BBC Two has re-launched its website with broadband users in mind – again with the chance to catch up on programmes you may have missed, or watch again something you’ve enjoyed, or to view clips. To quote one example, so far half a million people have requested clips from The Apprentice.
The Future
We also want to make large parts of the BBC archive available through the Player: too many of our greatest treasures remain inaccessible to the public. We also believe that a carefully selected and defined portion of the archive should be available for the public to use and repurpose themselves, whether as part of curriculum-based learning projects or for purely creative ends. This is what we call the Creative Archive. It’s a vision we’re collaborating on with other broadcasters and archive-holders. But we recognise that the Creative Archive raises particular rights and market impact issues and it will not form part of the initial Player approval or release.
But adding substantial archive resources to the Player is really only the start. At present, the Player allows the downloading of files. Elsewhere, as you’ve heard, we enable users to live-stream BBC services and programmes. In the future, we expect both downloading and streaming to develop rapidly. The BBC is working with ISPs to explore a range of options by which live TV can be scalably broadcast over the open internet across the UK.
Another option which we are looking at involves working with internet service providers to consider an upgrade to the whole UK internet. Together with ITV we recently launched a technical trial of the multicasting technology which could achieve this. We are broadcasting all our TV channels and national radio networks for the next six months to the subscribers of the handful of advanced UK ISPs who support this new layer on the internet. We’ll be looking at the outcome of this experiment, together with the other options, to work out the best way of making free-to-air live TV over the Internet a reality for audiences in the UK.
If we’re right and technology allows us to do that, then an utter revolution in broadcasting becomes possible. It is quite feasible to imagine the BBC offering every enabled licence-payer the possibility of fully personalised, drag-and-drop TV channels.
And the second part of the revolution is the movement of media around the house and around people’s lives. The Player trial is web-based: apart from the few techno-savvy users who already knew how to connect their PCs to the TVs, or to their PDAs, all those taking part in the trial had to watch the downloaded programmes on their PCs. Quite quickly we expect many more households to adopt a range of solutions for moving media from PC to TV and vice versa and from fixed devices to mobile ones and back again.
We want to make Player and Player-like functionality for BBC content available to as many licence-payers as possible on as many platforms and devices as possible. We are very happy to work with proprietary systems and operators as well as open systems like the web to deliver our content as conveniently as we can to the public. In the end, though, we believe it is likely and desirable that open, fully interoperable systems supported by common, effective Digital Rights Management controls, should become standard across platforms and devices.
The path to approval
As you’ve heard, the BBC already offers extensive on demand functionality on the web. You can live stream many, though not all, linear services, catch up on some, though not all, BBC programmes and use a limited amount of our archive – principally our radio archive. Conceptually, moreover, the Player offers nothing that you have not been able to achieve at home for years with a VHS recorder or a Sky Plus Recorder.
MyBBCPlayer is not therefore a new service in the way that the digital TV and radio channels launched earlier this decade were.
However, we recognise that the Player represents a substantial broadening of the scope of our on demand offering and an enhancement of its functionality. That is why the BBC Governors have concluded – rightly in my view – that there should be a Market Impact Assessment, with the participation of Ofcom, before they decide whether or not to approve it.
I only want to make two points in relation to the Market Impact Assessment. The first is to emphasise that the Player is not a proposition which offers new content to the public. It provides a different way for our licence-payers to access content which they have already paid for and which they could already watch or listen to with existing receiving equipment in their homes. Life On Mars or Fantabulosa! are already beamed out across the UK on network television. Making them available to cache on a PC as well as on tape or PVR certainly adds choice and convenience. It is far from obvious that it opens up a major new competitive threat to other content providers.
Secondly, we should not underestimate the positive market impact which the Player could have. The White Paper calls for the BBC to help ‘build Digital Britain’.
Analogue to digital television switchover is an important part of that process. I would argue, however, that the single most important element in building a truly Digital Britain is universal access to high speed broadband. Around the world and especially in the Far East, countries which are most committed to being winners in the ferociously competitive emerging global market are focusing on ensuring that as much of their population as possible has access to high speed or ultra high speed broadband. This is the most credible way not just of delivering a rich diet of media entertainment to the home but of ensuring that instant, high quality information and educational resources are available to all and that new, remote and interactive ways of building communities and businesses are available to everyone.
Now we believe that our Player – and, more broadly, our commitment to ensure that bbc.co.uk is at the leading edge of Web 2.0 – will drive broadband. It will encourage those who are not on line to go on line. It will encourage those who are not on broadband to adopt it. And within broadband it will encourage users to consider higher and higher speeds.
The next stage of the internet’s development will see dramatic change.
In the 90s, the BBC played a significant role – of course alongside many others – in getting Britain to take the internet seriously and to use it as a useful, practical resource. We believe that we have a significant role once more in helping to ensure that this country remains in the vanguard.
Our critics would have you believe that the BBC is platform-specific. It’s really and should definitely remain a linear TV and Radio broadcaster. It has no real business getting involved in new digital media.
Well our audiences beg to differ. bbc.co.uk is already one of our most popular services and is regarded by its users as being every bit as essential as BBC television and radio. In terms of functionality and scope, as the Player trial shows, our audiences are willing us on: asking for richer content, better search, more options, faster response times.
But more than that, the whole idea that media should be platform-specific is outdated. Already BBC News is a proposition which transcends any one platform. We deliver it on the web, to mobile devices, on radio, on TV. It’s local, it’s national, it’s global. Increasingly we think of it as a single proposition. The same will ultimately be true of all of our content. Future audiences will move effortlessly from medium to medium, from device to device.
That implies a very different BBC. But it doesn’t mean that the BBC is turning away from its fundamental mission. On the contrary, technology means that we can fulfil that public service mission more effectively than ever before. In the end, that is why on demand changes everything.