An Announcement for Tony Hall: BBC3 Was Already Dead

[Teddy Bear]

With the BBC still paying themselves even more, not to mention the cost for legal fees defending their actions, and wasted millions on various projects and building works that the licence fee payer will never benefit from, something has to give.
So they will be axing one of their channels - BBC3.
This could be the start of something good. Let's hope it's the first of many.
Former BBC producer Mark Mason has this to say about it.

An announcement for Tony Hall: BBC3 was already dead
Mark Mason

Two words tell you everything you need to know about today’s announcement that BBC3 is to become an online-only channel: ‘spoiler alert’. The phrase is now part of the cultural language, an everyday reality for consumers of all types of media. And that’s because broadcasting – the notion that we all watch the same thing at the same time – is, for huge numbers of people, dead. Not dying – dead.

That’s why it doesn’t matter that you’ll now only be able to watch BBC3 on the iPlayer. Of all Auntie’s channels it’s surely the best one to be pushed off the terrestrial cliff first — it’s aimed at the yoot, who are tableted and broadband-ed and 4G-ed up to the gonads. The idea that they’ll be bothered by not being able to watch Pramface and Snog Marry Avoid? on that steam-powered thing in the corner of the room called a … what was it again? … oh yes, a ‘television’ … is ridiculous.

I mean, even old farts like me are used to the fact that online is now the mainstream. The biggest TV hit of recent years – Breaking Bad – has been watched by different groups of people at different times via different media. Some people signed up to Netflix for the final series last summer. I was in the group who waited for the series to be released on DVD. It meant a couple of months of making sure that Netflix-enabled friends didn’t reveal anything to me. But they were happy to do that – which is exactly my point.

We live in a Spoiler Alert world now. Everyone accepts that others might not yet have seen TV shows, and tailors their conversation accordingly. The same thing happens with films – I saw Skyfall about a month after it came out at the cinema, long after several of my friends had done so. Not a single one of them had even hinted at the Big Surprise in the final scene. Nor had any of the TV or radio pundits I’d heard talking about the film. There seemed to be an unspoken nationwide agreement that everyone would keep it a secret. Even now, a couple of years after the film’s release, I’m not going to mention it here.

These days I conduct pretty much all my BBC TV viewing via iPlayer. It’s no longer a case of ‘What’s on tonight? I must make sure I’m in front of the TV at the appointed time’. Rather it’s ‘I’ve got an hour free now – let’s see what’s been on in the last week that I fancy the look of’. And even if viewers do want to watch a series in the old way – sitting down at the same time on the same day for several weeks running – then a web-only channel offers them that option. Witness that final series of Breaking Bad – Netflix ‘released’ each week’s episode on Monday evenings, and plenty of people watched it the very minute it became available. It was, to all intents and purposes, just like the old days.

If even I can get my head round that, the BBC3 posse certainly can (once they’ve finished laughing themselves senseless at me using such an old-fashioned word as ‘posse’). I don’t want to be the spoiler of the argument some people seem determined to have — but I really think they should become alert to the new reality.

[Teddy Bear]

An interesting and informative article from somebody in the business. David Elstein is a former chief executive of Channel 5, and understands the dynamics more than most.

All change! The BBC is changing direction...
In making BBC Three an online-only channel the director-general, Tony Hall, simply invites ever‑closer scrutiny of the anomalies in the licence fee

By David Elstein

Shock, horror! BBC TV says it will be closing one of its eight channels, in 18 months’ time, perhaps. A modest amount of money may be saved, only to be spent in other ways – on more drama, and on making original content targeted at young people available online. But only if the BBC Trust approves the proposal announced by Tony (Lord) Hall, the BBC director-general, who says he is “certain” that the decision is strategically right – effectively inviting the trust to dare to challenge his operational control of the corporation.

How typically BBC! Fourteen years ago, Mark Thompson, then director of television, told an audience in Canada that the BBC would be converting its embryonic digital channels, BBC Choice and BBC Knowledge, into BBC Three and BBC Four, in response to the inexorable logic driving television, whereby audiences were fragmenting and channels were trying to differentiate themselves, all as a result of the huge expansion of choice that digital television was opening up. BBC Four, we were told, would be dedicated to music, the arts, science, politics, philosophy and the world of ideas (not to mention drama series made in mixtures of Flemish and French, and Swedish and Danish).

BBC Three would target 16- to 34-year-olds, something that Channel 4 and its own digital offerings, such as E4, were doing very well. Indeed, if the objective was for a state-owned broadcaster to beef up its service to that demographic, giving the money to Channel 4 looked like a sensible bet. But the BBC was then still on its imperial march. It needed to embrace the whole population, in order to justify the licence fee; and as it had exclusive access to the licence fee, if it wanted to splurge £90-£100 million a year on that narrow demographic, no one other than the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport could stop it (to her credit, Tessa Jowell did reject the first version of BBC Three as unconvincing).

Now, a billion pounds later, the money has run out. Rather like our intervention in Afghanistan, the BBC has invaded unfamiliar territory, made a reasonable advance, and must now retreat. BBC Three did manage to win a slightly larger share of 16-34s than Channel 4, but only by defining the battleground narrowly as “transmission hours” – in other words, it measured its share of 16-34s during its eight hours on air, compared with Channel 4’s 24 hours: simple maths tells you that Channel 4 attracts nearly three times as many 16-34s in actual total.

But there is a simpler reason for this amoeba-like splitting up of the BBC channels and audiences: protecting the dominant viewership positions of BBC One – in particular – and BBC Two. Because younger viewers actually watch less live television than older ones, it dilutes your overall share of viewing if you cater specifically for them within your generalist channels. Hence the disappearance of children’s programmes from BBC One, now herded together in the digital ghettos of CBeebies and CBBC (both admirable in their own right, but all part of the segmentation process).

Of course, spreading your output in this way is inherently more expensive. One of the reasons BBC Three became vulnerable was that its “return on investment” (viewing share and additional reach delivered by the channel budget) compared poorly with other BBC channels. In an effort to put a gloss of strategic respectability on economic necessity, Hall has said that he is simply accelerating a process of shifting content aimed at 16-34s offline, which he might otherwise not have done for another five years if the economic straitjacket of the last licence fee settlement had not forced his hand.

The rationale is that this age group spends more time online than most others, so is more likely to catch this content once it is shifted to broadband servers. But this is whistling in the wind. Like the rest of us, 16‑34s consume the majority of content by watching it on-air on their televisions. Over 90 per cent of all content viewing is captured by TV channels, and the bulk of the rest is accounted for by the catch‑up services such as iPlayer.

Hall believes a large part of the BBC’s future will revolve around the iPlayer and its development into a portal whereby consumers can customise their content preferences, essentially bypassing the constraints of channel packaging. Indeed, Hall would like the licence fee to be extended to iPads and other tablets, as well as smartphones and all other devices capable of gaining access to BBC content. Even if politicians were to agree to this change, the chances of consumers calmly accepting it are probably not very high.

Indeed, it would make more sense to use the iPlayer more like iTunes, and start charging for it, as a more rational way of financing content than the licence fee. However, this line of development is much more consistent with a voluntary subscription system – perhaps geared to tiers of content, as with Sky and Virgin Media – than the licence fee itself: a direction of travel the BBC is keen to avoid.

Meanwhile, what of the regulatory process of BBC Trust approval (a mechanism introduced by Jowell to replace approval by politicians of BBC service proposals)? It can be convoluted. When Thompson – during his period as director-general – tested the waters of service closure by proposing to shut two small radio channels, he was rebuffed by the trust, specifically over 6Music, which perversely managed to boost its listenership after enthusiasts campaigned to keep it open. It survives today.
But that was a sighting shot, during Thompson’s ambitious campaign to “put quality first” (where had it been until then?) by making internal savings of £600 million a year and redistributing them within the BBC to improve its services. Sadly, the Coalition spotted this number and, during the 48 hours of shotgun negotiations in October 2010 over the licence fee, imposed on the BBC an income freeze and new spending obligations (including the BBC World Service, S4C, broadband roll-out and local TV roll-out) that would soak up virtually the whole amount, while taking the cost of those obligations off the Government’s books.

Should the BBC Trust and Executive Board have resigned en masse, rather than allow the licence fee to be so heavily top-sliced for services that were nothing to do with the licence-fee payer? They chose to succumb – and the BBC’s finance director even told the BBC pension fund trustees that maybe it was a good thing to have politicians so invested in the licence fee mechanism: they would be less likely to try to replace it with something more rational and equitable, like subscription! Ironically for the 16-34s, any money saved by closing BBC Three will be needed to plug the deficit in that pension fund, to which the BBC is committed to contributing up to £100 million a year for several years.

Yet how much money will be saved? Nothing on transmission costs: all the BBC Three capacity will be used to add an hour to CBBC airtime and to launch a +1 channel for BBC One (repeating the programme cycle an hour later, a tried and tested commercial device for propping up audience share). As for the programme budget, £30 million a year will be diverted to BBC drama (where Hall feared that any further salami-slicing of every area of BBC expenditure would most visibly dilute quality); £20 million a year will be “saved” (no doubt to be spent on the additional programme costs involved in the +1 channel), and – it appears – some £25 million a year will be spent on online content designed to appeal to 16-34s.

This seems to me the area of greatest vulnerability during the trust’s deliberations over the whole proposal. If BBC Three “the channel” was relatively poor value for money, how can any BBC Three-style content spend online fail to be worse value, given that it will inevitably attract less viewing? Hall promises that so-called “long-form” online content (that is, traditional TV programmes) will be re-broadcast on BBC One or BBC Two, which will assuage to some extent the creative community who have found an outlet on BBC Three. Yet is this not simply going back to a more mixed schedule for BBC One and BBC Two, a bit like the good old days?

That such a modest proposal (not in the Swiftian sense, but literally) should be subject to such a lengthy approval and implementation timetable tells us how hard it is to turn around the BBC tanker. During the decades of constant BBC expansion, and constant rises in revenues as the number of homes paying the licence fee steadily increased, the issue of retreat never really featured in BBC thinking. Now many painful choices will have to be made. Perhaps even the major internal inefficiencies in the BBC’s structure – in-house production, a distribution arm that is only quasi-commercial – will now come under closer scrutiny.

Has a generation been betrayed by the BBC? That is foolish talk. Long before BBC Three was even thought of, brilliant comedy series targeting this demographic – like The Young Ones – were a regular part of BBC mainstream output. Now they will have a brief life online before being re-incorporated there. Much bigger decisions surely await Lord Hall and the trust. BBC Three may prove to be the first straw in a veritable gale.