Former BBC acting chair Dame Elan Closs Stephens delivered a speech to a Prix Italia audience in Turin last week. She's presumably reasonably in touch with BBC thinking, and this part of her talk suggests maybe it's time to raise some funds for public service broadcasting from those who profit from broadband infrastructure...
Public service broadcasters pay a heavy price for universality - for the ability to talk to all wherever they are. That price is the necessity to ride two horses – to transmit on terrestrial transmitters in order to reach everyone and to distribute on digital platforms. Some of those digital platforms are not open to everyone either through cost or through problems of the infrastructure. But our old-fashioned transmitters reach out to society as a whole. And they are an expense.
Streamers have no such obligations. They are free to provide a digital only service. And that digital only service is an entertainment library without the heavy cost of live breaking news - a very costly undertaking born by public service broadcasters in the UK. Surely the time has come for some of the cost of our terrestrial infrastructure and even the costs of our broadband infrastructure to be shared industry wide. Let me expand. National broadcasters have always contributed to the cost of national infrastructure from terrestrial radio transmitters to digital multiplexes. The UK Government has paid substantial sums to try to reach the last 5% of digital broadband exclusion. Yet, as far as I am aware, there is no levy towards the national infrastructure from those who profit from it the most. Governments in the UK and Europe have to re-assess the ideas of a completely free market – a free market that is weighted heavily in one direction. It’s time to understand the value of our national broadcasters and to provide a level field of competition.
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