Well done

In one of its first completed reports under the chairmanship of Julian "Media For Dummies" Knight MP, the DCMS Select Committee has produced a sensible and useful report on the future of public service broadcasters.  One suspects the crafting and direction of Professor Catherine Johnson from Hull University and Joey Jones, formerly of Sky News, has helped. 

There's very little the BBC will be unhappy about - universality of provision celebrated, trusted news essential, and a recognition that you can't really change from Licence Fee funding until there's universal provision of broadcast-capable broadband. It warns the Government off decriminalisation, and accepts all the PSB's arguments about prominence of their content on other providers' TV guides. There's one rather churlish remark about not moving BBC educational programming onto terrestrial tv fast enough in the pandemic, which, considering the speed of the Bitesize response, is deeply ungracious. 

One new suggestion is that Netflix, Amazon and others should be made to release audience figures for content that started life with PSBs....

We recommend the Government impose two specific requirements in relation to PSB content hosted on other streaming services in new media legislation. First, PSB content should be clearly labelled as such and branded with the logo of the PSB from which the content originated. Secondly, streaming services should be required to share top line viewing data—at the very least, the number of viewers—for PSB content they host with Ofcom and the relevant PSBs to enable full analysis of PSB reach, and the audio-visual landscape as a whole.