17
Examination of witnesses
Professor Catherine Johnson, Gill Hind and Chris Waiting.
Q1 The Chair: Good afternoon and welcome to this meeting of the Communications and Digital Committee. Today we are holding the first of a short series of evidence sessions focused on the BBC charter review. The Government kicked off this review process by publishing a Green Paper in December setting out proposals for the BBC’s next royal charter. The public consultation on those proposals closed in March, and we are expecting a White Paper to follow later this year. In our work on this committee, we will be focusing particularly on the proposals put forward in Chapters 2 and 3 of the Green Paper. We will discuss these with a range of witnesses in the coming weeks. I am delighted to welcome our first panel in this short inquiry. Could I ask each of you to introduce yourselves, starting with Chris Waiting?
Chris Waiting: I am the chief executive of The Conversation and part of the British Broadcasting Challenge, a campaign group focused on the future of PSB in the UK.
Gill Hind: I am the managing director of media at Enders Analysis. We are a research and advisory company that focuses on the TMT sector.
Professor Catherine Johnson: I am professor of media and communications at the University of Leeds. I have been doing research on public service media—particularly television—for the last 20 years, including a three-year project last year looking at the impact of platforms on public service broadcasters across seven markets.
Q2 The Chair: Let me ask the first question, then. The BBC says that it is now “at risk like never before”, and that global streaming and social media platforms pose the “greatest threat” to the UK’s broadcasting sector. How well do you think these statements capture the challenges currently faced by the BBC and other public sector broadcasters? I will start with you, Professor Johnson.
Professor Catherine Johnson: That is a fairly accurate picture. It is important to understand the nature of the threat. Where we once had public service broadcasters as the primary players in national markets, they are now in national markets that are much more open to global influence. They are facing competition from platforms and streamers for our time and attention, talent, production and revenues, but they are also increasingly having to deliver via the internet.
They are becoming dependent on tech and media infrastructure that is owned by US tech oligarchs. These companies increasingly set the terms and values that underpin the UK’s audiovisual media system. The risk is that those values are at odds with the public service broadcasters’ aims and remits, and it is a largely unregulated environment. I am happy to talk more about some of the challenges that we found in our research that public service broadcasters are facing as a consequence of that wider change, if that is of interest.
Gill Hind: I agree with everything you said there, Cathy. I would just like to elaborate on a couple of points. If you go back to the time of the last charter, say 10 years ago, and you look at consumption of video, on the TV set 98% of everything viewed was from broadcasters and a tiny weeny bit from the likes of Netflix and YouTube.
If you fast forward to now, you will see that the picture is entirely different. In fact, YouTube was 10% of all viewing on the television set last year, which is quite phenomenal. Then you have the SVODs. The biggest service is actually Netflix; it is bigger than the BBC. In terms of consumption, you can see that the British broadcasters—not just the BBC, but all the PSBs and indeed Sky—are facing much greater competition, which of course is impacting how much they can then invest back into the production sector and so on. We get this ever worse spiral.
Chris Waiting: I agree with the other two panellists that it is a uniquely challenging moment. There is a major shift in audience behaviour, as we have heard, as well as changes to the fundamental architecture under which public service broadcasting is delivered, moving away from over-the-air transmission towards IP delivery. Obviously, PSBs such as the BBC need to continue to distribute through those channels, but it means they have higher costs and are reliant on platforms and technologies over which they have little control.
I realise that this committee is focused on specific chapters of the Green Paper, but behind all these are obviously the questions of independence and funding, and the challenges the BBC faces if it is not independent. Its charter expiring every 10 years is a cut-off point beyond which it cannot necessarily operate. Then there is the question of funding: the BBC has to spend money to distribute content and to be present on these multiple platforms, at a time when its current funding model is in decline. It is really important that what comes out of the White Paper addresses both those threats, in order to explore these technological challenges.
Q3 Lord Kirkhope of Harrogate: Welcome. Can I just take you back? I do not want to go on about the history of the BBC, but it has always had what has been referred to more recently with the Green Paper as the “BBC mission”, and yet the whole world has moved on, of course. The original mission of speaking peace to nations or whatever it was on the actual coat of arms of the BBC has long moved away, apart from perhaps with the World Service.
The Green Paper makes some suggestions about the use of third-party platforms. There is a reference here to Channel 4, which has a rather amorphous or middle-of-the-road approach to that. But of course here we have a suggestion that the BBC should allow its content to be more broadly seen through using platforms such as YouTube, for instance. The BBC wants to increase its visibility, although reference again to this business of the BBC’s mission includes this question of a “closed and safe ecosystem”, as it is referred to. In your eyes, what are the risks here of such a policy? What may be the opportunities of such a policy? To what extent should the charter, in being redrawn, have some specific mitigations in relation to that? It is a very wide question, but it impinges on the whole ethos and way in which the BBC looks at itself. Could you comment, please?
Gill Hind: We will take this all together. The first thing to look at is what people are watching, especially younger people. For children, 32% of their viewing last year on the television was YouTube. Obviously, outside the TV, they are all basically sitting there on their phones. They are watching YouTube, TikTok, or whatever. Even with 30 to 34 year-olds, 15% of everything they watch on TV is video-sharing platforms: it is basically YouTube. There is a big issue when we see that broadcast viewing is declining and is going to continue to decline: if the BBC, with its mission, needs to hit younger people, it has to be broadcasting or be on the platforms where people are watching.
That is an opportunity, but obviously there are a lot of risks involved in that as well. There are various of those. Obviously, if you are on something such as YouTube, there is an algorithm that determines what you watch and what you have watched before, then you will watch more of that. There is a danger that there is just the BBC, or the other public service broadcasters, against the billions of hours of YouTube content that is up there. How do you make sure that content is viewable? That is one of the big issues that comes out of this charter. There have been discussions at Ofcom and the DCMS about making YouTube part of the prominence regime. Regulation should look at that quite seriously.
Professor Catherine Johnson: It is really important to recognise that the public service broadcasters are already doing this. Channel 4 started a deal with YouTube a few years ago, ITV has a deal with YouTube, and the BBC now has a deal with YouTube, for all the reasons that Gill gave. With the research that we did, we looked at 10 public service broadcasters across seven media markets. A few of them are saying, “We’re not really using social media at all”, but the vast majority are. They talked to us about significant risks that they faced in doing that. They felt they had to, but they were very anxious about it.
One of the risks, as Gill said, is around content visibility and the transparency around that. We had public service broadcasters talking about what is referred to as shadow banning: suddenly their content disappears and they do not know why, and there is no way to find out. That links to accountability. We heard about content being taken down that was compliant with the watershed in the UK, and then by the time you go to a moderator it is completely out of date, especially if it is news content.
Then there is reduced access to data. Data is increasingly the engine that drives today’s contemporary media industries; it helps to inform user engagement, editorial strategies, decision-making, and so on, and it demonstrates fulfilment of remit. But the data that public service broadcasters get from the social media platforms is much less than they would get from their own services.
Then there is just the platform architecture itself, which has been shown to amplify harmful and misleading content, potentially encouraging addictive user behaviour. There are concerns from public service broadcasters that just putting their content on these platforms lends them legitimacy, or that they are going to have to adjust their editorial strategies to align with the values of the video-sharing platform’s algorithms. So there are a number of risks there.
My take on this is that we need some kind of regulation. There is prominence regulation, and there are a few different ways that you could do that, but there also needs to be greater accountability for video-sharing platforms. Ofcom needs to be able to verify the reach of content from public service broadcasters on those platforms. There is also an argument for looking at the terms of trade in terms of requiring greater data sharing and, for the commercial public service broadcasters, looking at revenue shares.
Chris Waiting: Again, I would agree with all that. The BBC, in particular, is defined by universality. It is something that is available to all of us and that all of us are paying for, and so it is right for it to be available on those platforms where audiences are. Looking at the report that came out over the weekend on young people not in education, employment or training, there is a risk that the BBC loses that generation if it is not present on those platforms. Professor Johnson is absolutely right that there need to be some conditions in return for the BBC being there around data sharing, prominence and so on.
Q4 Lord Kirkhope of Harrogate: This, in fact, does not retain the BBC’s particular difference, as it were. You are equating it almost with the Channel 4 approach. Currently, as far as I am aware, the BBC will allow third-party platforms only to carry trailers to bring people back into the BBC sphere, as opposed to pushing them out to the other platforms to have the full experience of the programming.
Professor Catherine Johnson: That was its strategy, but it has announced a new deal with YouTube. There is a shift in strategy at the BBC just recently.
Gill Hind: Yes, in January. Now the BBC is actually making bespoke content for YouTube. It has not aired yet, but it is starting to make bespoke content.
Q5 Lord Kirkhope of Harrogate: Finally, the risks, then: I asked you for the opportunities and risks. It sounds like there are a load of opportunities here, but what about risks? Are there no risks at all in terms of the personification of the BBC, its constitution and nature, as opposed to any other risks? Are there no risks?
Professor Catherine Johnson: No, there are multiple risks, indeed. One is about a value misalignment. The values of public service media and public service remits are not aligned with the values of those social media platforms, which is why there is an argument for regulation of those social media platforms.
I teach public service media to students. A couple of years ago, one of my students said, “This is so interesting, this public service media thing. Why isn’t our media like that?” What she meant was, “I don’t really use the BBC, I don’t watch a lot of television, I’m on social media all the time. Why doesn’t my media have those kinds of positive benefits that you older people are getting with your media?” That is a question we should be asking.
Chris Waiting: The question of risks is absolutely right. The BBC should want its viewers and listeners to be consuming content primarily on the platforms it owns. That way, that is the safe environment. It can make sure that all the content is compliant and that it is a safe space for younger audiences, for example. Whatever strategy it can have to bring them in, it also needs to be realistic. It cannot just tell young people that they need to come over here. It needs to find them where they are and have a strategy that allows for that. The point about legitimacy of those platforms and whether that dilutes the BBC’s direct connection is absolutely a risk.
Finally, there is a risk strategically to us as a country of being reliant on these platforms, which are almost entirely foreign-owned and foreign-controlled. My colleague Pat Younge talks about the six richest men in America, who increasingly control the platforms and technologies on which a lot of this content is distributed. We as a country need to recognise that the BBC, and the PSB ecosystem more generally, needs to ensure that it has a direct relationship with the people of the UK, whether that is in moments of crisis, for the provision of high-quality news, or for all the other content people can find elsewhere.
Gill Hind: I am just going to add one comment in there, which relates to the commercial broadcasters, not the BBC: the revenue that they get from their YouTube content is very small in comparison to broadcast.
The Chair: That is worth noting, thank you. Let us move on to questions on partnerships.
Q6 Lord Knight of Weymouth: In the Government’s Green Paper, they said that they thought there was an “urgent need” for ambitious strategic partnerships between the public service broadcasters to enable them to compete with the global technology companies, or the oligarchs, as Professor Johnson described them. Do you agree with that statement? If so, what lessons can we draw from Project Kangaroo and Freely, or from some other attempted collaborations between the PSBs? Let us start with Chris and then go along.
Chris Waiting: There are not too many barriers in the charter to the BBC doing more partnerships with other PSB organisations as well as other bits of civic infrastructure, such as the British Library, National Archives, museums and galleries. That is something we should expect the BBC to do, as indeed it has always done.
Looking back at what happened with Project Kangaroo, it was in the early days of iPlayer and was a proposed sharing of that technology across PSBs. In hindsight, most people recognised that that was a missed opportunity. It was in the market long before Netflix was streaming and would have given the UK PSB ecosystem a real step up. Part of the problem when that was reviewed was that it was looked at through a very narrow definition of what broadcasting was and could be.
Certainly, looking ahead, we have talked about prominence, and the prominence regime is struggling to keep up—it is still talking about icons on smart TVs rather than algorithms—but I suspect over the next 10 years there may need to be discussions about prominence within AI. If YouTube is recommending content based on a chatbot, or indeed a ChatGPT or a Claude is increasingly drawing on content from PSBs, what do we need to be thinking of in that space? How should we therefore be evaluating proposed collaboration? But the BBC has always been an organisation built on partnerships. Certainly, the more it can do and the fewer hurdles there are, whether that is removing formal trials or doing competition assessments, the more that would help it to do that.
Q7 Lord Knight of Weymouth: Just before Gill responds, you said that there was not much that needed to be changed, in essence, around the charter or the framework agreement. A change to the competition authority’s stance would be necessary, though.
Chris Waiting: I agree. To go back slightly to the previous question about the challenges from streaming platforms, the answer is probably not in the charter. It is in some regulation of the platforms, rather than itself. The review of the charter is an important moment to look at the regulations and legislation more generally. You would want a charter to support that, but ultimately, the BBC should be set tasks that are defined by the ends, not the means, and that recognise how rapidly this space is moving.
Gill Hind: I am going to agree with everything you said there, Chris. You mentioned Kangaroo and Freely. I would like to talk about the success stories there. Freely is a success story. It is new, but behind that, if you think about Freeview and Freeview HD, that is where the PSBs were collaborating and it has proved hugely successful. Freeview has been the largest TV platform for years now. Freely is the next generation of that. Where the PSBs work well together is when it is about things such as distribution. You always have to consider that every single broadcaster will have different strategies and objectives. It is always going to be very difficult to come up with one path through, as you can imagine, especially if the others are funded by advertising and the BBC is not.
Where the PSBs have worked well is on distribution. Something that they should really be looking to collaborate on is the technical investments they have. At the moment they all have their own individual iPlayer—ITVX, et cetera. You can see there is a very strong argument for pooling those resources. Even if you do not have one player that they all use, you have the same tech stack underneath it, with their own portals, et cetera. That would make a huge difference because they are competing with the likes of Netflix, which has an incredible user interface. They will never have the money to spend against that but, put together, collaboration on that would be very productive.
Professor Catherine Johnson: I am going to do some agreeing, and then I am going to do some other stuff, so it is not just all agreeing.
Lord Knight of Weymouth: We love a bit of other stuff.
Professor Catherine Johnson: Yes. I completely agree on competition regulation. The key thing there is recognising the nature of the market the BBC is operating in, how you define that market, and recognising that there are these players that the BBC is competing with that are operating in this multi-market way. That is one of the natures of platforms. That is the key thing around competition.
In terms of collaboration, I would agree around tech innovation. One of the things to recognise is that public service broadcasters cannot simply copy what the likes of Netflix are doing—say, around algorithm innovation and what their interfaces look like—because they need to be bound by public service values. Those public service values are different. What you have at the moment is the BBC creating its own algorithms, and you have Channel 4 and ITV buying them off the shelf and then adapting them. There is a lot that could be done from sharing innovation around technology—algorithms, AI and son—in the public interest.
However, there is a real risk in thinking that this is the silver bullet that is going to solve everything: if only we just get the public service broadcasters to work together, then there is more scale, and then that addresses the fact that they are dealing with these larger competitors. The scale of the competitors is just not replicable by national broadcasters because they are operating at a global scale. We want our public service broadcasters to serve the UK; we want them to serve the UK market principally. I worry a little that there is this approach of, “Oh, we’ll look at that because it’s an easy regulatory thing to do. It doesn’t involve any changes to the charter”, rather than looking at the wider infrastructure and addressing some of those challenges.
We have multiple public service broadcasters because back in the day we thought it was good to have competition for public service broadcasting; that that would keep our public service broadcasters honest. We might want to have a conversation about whether that is actually still happening. Is that still possible with the commercial public service broadcasters’ remits going less and less? The fact that they are in competition makes it harder—in the way that Gill was talking about—for them to come together and have one on-demand player or whatever.
Q8 Lord Knight of Weymouth: I will come back to that, but I will ask just a small thing before I do. If I choose to access public service broadcasting through my Sky box thing, I get recommendations of public service content. Are you saying that I cannot do that if I go through a public service app; I can do that only if I go through an independent app?
Professor Catherine Johnson: It depends on what the terms of agreement are between the broadcasters when they are making those deals about going on different platforms because it all depends on what metadata you are sharing. They operate in different ways.
Lord Knight of Weymouth: It could be done, they just have to agree.
Professor Catherine Johnson: Freely basically does that. Freely creates this environment where you go into this public service broadcaster environment, you can watch live TV, and you can get recommendations from the different broadcasters all in one place. Freely is the epitome of that.
Q9 Lord Knight of Weymouth: Finally, I would like to come back to what you were saying about the silver bullet thing. Clearly, you are bound to be right, but I just have a question about whether we are being ambitious enough when we are thinking about this. Why should we not think about a single platform for all the glorious, rich content that our public service broadcasters collectively produce and look for it to compete against HBO Max, Netflix, Prime, Disney, Paramount, and all those others that we are shelling out on subscriptions for? The list is endless. Why could we here in the UK not be in the mix? You say it is because they are big global players and they have that reach. Is it possible to argue that in the English-speaking world—certainly the BBC has a good brand, it has reach—we could behave like a platform, rather than a public service broadcaster that does a bit of video on demand on the side?
Professor Catherine Johnson: There are lots of things there. Absolutely, for all our public service broadcasters, their strategy is digital first. That is their ambition. Obviously, they still have to provide linear television—broadcast television—to those people who are still dependent on it. There are about 4 million people in the UK solely dependent on watching linear broadcast television. That is still a requirement for them, and that can have an impact on their tech innovation.
I would recommend going and having a look at a Freely telly because that is exactly what you are asking for. It is not available on all TV sets because these things are down to commercial agreements. Gill could certainly go into this in more detail for you if you wanted. Freely is exactly that one-stop shop space for public service broadcasting that also does a really interesting thing of providing linear alongside on demand, so that those audiences who are much more comfortable in a linear environment are not going to lose that. There is quite a lot of evidence that this on-demand environment is really difficult for some people.
Chris Waiting: That call for ambition is good. It may be that something such as that is necessary but not sufficient, because if you pool all that content together you have a degree of archive content but how much of that gets consumed at any one moment in time? As Gill was saying earlier, the needs of the broadcasters are different: iPlayer at the moment does not have the functionality to deliver ads, for example.
It is not a straightforward project, but the ambition of creating some sort of sovereign digital platform is an interesting idea to explore. It could go beyond PSBs. As I mentioned earlier, there is the role of other civic institutions—universities, libraries, museums, galleries and indeed the work of the Government Digital Service. There could be something really bold that you look at in that space. As well as focusing on the content, you could look at some architecture that underpins it.
Q10 Baroness Caine of Kentish Town: You have just started to illuminate something I was going to ask. The Green Paper talks about partnerships with public service broadcasters and others. It is the “and others” in a digital AI age that I was interested in exploring, as well as the other players that you just mentioned. Happily, you have just touched on and answered my question. I do not know whether you might want to amplify that. The other thing I wanted to touch on was whether you have any international examples. Is there anything that we can look at from outside the UK that would be useful for us to consider within the UK when addressing this question?
Professor Catherine Johnson: The biggest international example would be Project PEACH. That was a project led by the EBU—European Broadcasting Union—to create a public service broadcasting algorithm that public service broadcasters across Europe could just adopt. That has been adopted, but it is not nearly as widespread as it had hoped. That speaks to the fact that across Europe you have different broadcasters with very different business needs, funded in different ways, with different remits. A lot of those broadcasters said, “Well, we could take that, but we’d have to adapt it anyway. We’ve already started adapting this commercial algorithm, so we’re going to stick with that”. That speaks to the challenge of getting one piece of tech to work for businesses that have really different demands on them.
Gill Hind: I am not sure there is a lot more I can add to that question because the others have actually said it all. It is incredibly complex, and many of the underlying issues are the different objectives of each individual party. Freely, if you have not seen it, is supposedly broadcast-like for the IP generation. On those Freely TVs, you are still going to have the likes of Netflix on there. In reality, I can imagine that in five years’ time there will be, say, two or three global streamers that everyone will watch, and you will have two or three, or maybe one or two, local players in each market. That therefore calls for those local players to be bigger together; hence the BBC’s call for iPlayer to open up a bit more.
Q11 Baroness Caine of Kentish Town: Are there any other partners that have not already been mentioned that you would identify in the UK context?
Gill Hind: Public libraries and institutions. In terms of AI, there is an argument about publishers as well because what we are seeing is large language models coming down and scraping video content, publishers’ content. There is an argument that the BBC should be at the centre of all that in terms of pulling it together.
Professor Catherine Johnson: We could also think about minority languages there. Could the BBC be a driver in terms of developing a large language model for Welsh, Gaelic, et cetera? That is not going to happen in the market, but it makes it very difficult because things such as voice recognition just do not work for those minority languages. If you are S4C, that is a significant challenge moving forward. There is some research that shows that voice recognition is much easier for older audiences, when they are shifting over to on-demand environments, than almost any other way of finding content, actually. Yes, that is something.
Chris Waiting: On the topic of AI, the BBC was one of the organisations that brought together this SPUR Coalition of news publishers. It has made a number of demands of major AI firms to ensure that content is accurately cited, that it receives some data, and those kinds of things. To go back to the previous question, it is an opportunity to think about what our civic technology needs are. That might be some sort of sovereign AI; it might also be a way of bringing down some costs.
I was quite struck recently that if you were to replace the search bar on the BBC homepage with an AI overview the way that Google has, the cost in tokens—in computing power—of doing that for the 20 million readers that the BBC homepage gets each month, could be up to £500 million a year. This stuff is incredibly expensive. It is right for the BBC to have a role in AI. It is right for the British Library, the National Archives and universities to have a role. Looking at some of these technology needs, the BBC could absolutely be a partner in bringing together some of that AI work, but the BBC cannot do all the work itself.
Q12 Lord Storey: I wanted to remind us that we talk about the PSBs, but of course Channel 5 is owned by Paramount, Sky is owned by Comcast, and Comcast is bidding for ITV and aims to create a British streaming powerhouse. That is going to have huge impacts on PSBs generally, is it not?
Gill Hind: Yes, Comcast has owned Sky now for several years—five or six years, I cannot remember how long—but actually the Sky leadership is very much ensconced in the UK broadcasting ecosystem. You can see that with Sky News, for example. Sky News is an incredibly powerful news organisation. There was always a fear that Murdoch was going to lessen its output, but that has not happened under Comcast either.
There is a huge amount of investment going into the UK from Comcast in Sky, and actually if it were to be able to acquire ITV, you would have a very strong player there. I mentioned before that you are likely to have one or two strong local players in each market. ITV and Sky together could become the second one behind the BBC because Sky can put that investment in tech. It has the tech already from Comcast that can give it the scale to be able to compete and to negotiate with the likes of Samsung and LG in terms of getting on to the TV sets and getting good deals in terms of visibility, which ITV as a smaller company is less able to do. There are benefits for public service broadcasting in there as well.
Q13 Lord Tarassenko: I would like to switch tracks slightly to R&D. I am a professor of engineering at a university, and our top graduates used to compete to join the BBC R&D departments. They are prestigious jobs, but of course technology, R&D and innovation were removed last time round. I know that the British Broadcasting Challenge is very keen that they should be reinstated. I looked on the web and there are 200 R&D staff currently in the BBC in North Lab and South Lab. What difference would reinstating it as one of the six now in the charter make to R&D, compared with what the BBC is already doing now in the current charter?
Chris Waiting: The public purpose that was in the previous charter gave the BBC a responsibility to make available to the British public the benefits of new emerging digital technologies. At the time, that was part of the requirement for the BBC to lead the analogue switch-off: the switch from analogue broadcasting to digital broadcasting. It also slightly gave the BBC the opportunity to build iPlayer. At the time, it sat under that public purpose and allowed the BBC to do more things. The BBC is and always has been an engineering organisation, something that builds things with public interest at the heart. The patents on the things it has invented have been shared and have also provided a stream of income for the BBC. Putting that back in there would give the BBC a clear signal that this is something that is important.
The point I made right at the start about the finite end of the current charter means that the BBC has struggled to be a long-term partner because it always has to acknowledge it might not exist in two years, or in eight years. Having it clearly as a public purpose would ring-fence that funding. The BBC’s funding having been cut by 35% or 40%—depending on how you calculate it—over the last 15 years means that every part of the organisation has been squeezed, including R&D. Having it as an explicit purpose would mean that in those discussions about funding and those trade-offs, it would have a louder voice.
Q14 Lord Tarassenko: I have to follow up on AI, if I may. Of course, if it was reinstated and given a higher profile there would have to be some AI research, and indeed there is some activity there as it is. Of course, you have given the best possible example of how the BBC building its own AI overviews would be a costly enterprise. But is there not something that the BBC could do, which I have not seen, which would join two dots? I remember the use of BBC Micro, which if you think about it was a form of AI in those days, 35 years ago. We have Bitesize at the moment. The Government, through the DfE, are looking for AI tutors. The BBC is a trusted public organisation, so the material it could put together for AI tutoring would be respected by all. Would it be possible to join its education and R&D together to deliver this form of AI tutoring to the UK?
Chris Waiting: With sufficient funding, yes. The compute costs that I talked about are using off-the-shelf token costs. It is absolutely right, with the BBC as the most trusted news organisation, as an organisation built around public interest and public values, to do those sorts of projects. Obviously, it has its history with BBC Micro and micro:bit more recently.
It is about not just not underestimating the cost of doing that but recognising that there are lots of commercial businesses that may say, “We fancy a bit of that”. To the discussion around competition regulation before, the BBC has pulled out of some spaces around learning in the past, around local, because of commercial interests, rightly or wrongly. We need a clear signal that this is something we want the BBC to do, even if that potentially squeezes out some other organisations, because it is in all our interests as citizens.
Q15 The Chair: Let me come to a question about at-risk genres. Should the next charter introduce stronger obligations to ensure that a wide range of public service content, including those at-risk genres such as the arts and religion and belief, remain discoverable and accessible online?
Professor Johnson, I was looking back at your Behind the Screen report, which I attended the launch of a while back. I was thinking that although the BBC outperforms the other PSBs in provision—that is one thing the BBC is at least doing better—viewing of at-risk genres has declined overall. That report you produced really went to the heart of that. When it comes to this issue and how it relates to the BBC charter, what should be in the BBC charter that deals with that?
Professor Catherine Johnson: Thank you for mentioning that research; I feel very strongly about this. We need to have something in the public purposes for the BBC that specifically mentions diversity and a range of genres. I would like it to specifically mention these at-risk genres because they have been removed from the requirements for the BBC, and they have been removed from the Media Act. They are not there any more. In our research we looked at programmes about religion, belief and faith, international issues, and arts and culture, and the BBC is the only broadcaster providing those in any number. It is the only broadcaster providing arts and culture programmes around ballet, opera, visual art and classical music. These things are completely absent from the other broadcasters.
There needs to be something around that, but it is not just about making the programmes but how easy it is to find those programmes. In our research we created these very personalised accounts and we found that if you watch only those programmes then the iPlayer algorithm would give you more of them, but if you did not watch them at all then the number you would see compared with an account that had not watched anything halved. We looked at the top 100 most prominent programmes, and we looked at the top 10. There were half in an account that did not watch those programmes over a period of a few months. If you do not start off watching any of these programmes, although you might have an interest in them, you are not going to think they are on there. There is a real issue there around both making those programmes and making them discoverable.
The other issue is accountability. The research that you mentioned was extremely difficult to do because none of the public service broadcasters make the protocols that sit behind their video on demand and other on demand services publicly available. You can operate with a public API, as it is called, but they do not operate with public API. We asked them all for data to help us. The BBC gave us some aggregated audience data and Channel 4 gave us some catalogue data. That was all we got. It makes it very, very hard to understand what is in their catalogues and how prominent it is. It makes it hard to reproduce that research because the code is constantly changing, so you are constantly having to update it.
There is a risk here also to the transparency and accountability of public service broadcasters. We know that if you do not measure it, it disappears. Look at what happened with children’s programming: you take an obligation away, you do not measure it, it disappears. There is a real risk here.
Q16 The Chair: That is really helpful. Around the other PSBs, across the piece, how can we protect those at-risk genres? You mentioned in your report a role for Ofcom in monitoring these issues of availability, prominence and discoverability. It seems from what you are saying that discoverability is such a big part of it, is it not?
Professor Catherine Johnson: It is.
The Chair: If you cannot find it, you are never going to watch it.
Professor Catherine Johnson: Yes. Ofcom needs to be doing more here. It is looking at genres, but it is not looking specifically at those genres that were removed. It is in very broad terms. It is looking at documentary or whatever, which is a very broad term, and used very differently by the different public service broadcasters. In our report, we argue that there needs to be a greater culture of transparency across the public service broadcasters in terms of facilitating the monitoring. We would be quite happy to monitor if they helped us in terms of that transparency. That could include more algorithmic transparency as well. If we know how their algorithms work, that makes the research easier to do as well.
Q17 Lord Storey: If you are a streamer you do not need a licence to operate in the UK, is that correct?
Professor Catherine Johnson: Yes.
Lord Storey: If you are a streamer you do not need a licence to operate; if you are a PSB you do. Why could we not be saying that streamers have to have a licence, and part of that licence is a requirement to have a percentage of cultural programmes, for example, or religious programmes?
Professor Catherine Johnson: We could ask that of our public service broadcasters as a starting point, though, could we not?
Lord Storey: You looked quite shocked when I said that, so I thought, “Oh”.
Chris Waiting: If you go back to the previous ways that the BBC and other PSBs distributed content, they had a lot of control over it. If they are increasingly looking at these online video platforms, they have less control. It is absolutely reasonable to look at the algorithms, the questions of prominence, and so on, that we touched on earlier. Particularly for the other PSBs, there is always a compact between the Government and a public service broadcaster, saying, “You need to produce certain types of content, in a certain number of hours, in certain genres, commissioned in certain parts of the UK. It needs to meet certain quality thresholds. In return, you get some things. Those things are prominence—you get to be slot 101 or 103 on an EPG—and you don’t have to pay for distribution on those free-to-air platforms”. Increasingly, those benefits are worth less and less.
As we look across the PSB ecosystem, we are really fortunate in the UK to have not just the BBC—we have ITV, looking back to its franchise era, as well as Channel 4 and Channel 5, regardless of who owns them. The question is: if there were too many more requirements on Channel 5, would it say, “I’m going to hand back my PSB licence”? We do not want it to do that. We need to think about what could be offered to it as an incentive to remain as a PSB and comply with the reporting criteria that we expect of it. Looking at what those things are, is it the algorithmic prominence, the discovery on other platforms, or compute power, so that it is able to embrace these new technologies?
Professor Catherine Johnson: It is worth saying that the legislation had this list of genres that public service broadcasting in the UK overall had to provide and Ofcom had to monitor, and that was removed. The Communications Act 2003 had that, and that was removed in the Media Act. You are asking for something that we used to have that has gone.
Lord Storey: They pay taxes, of course, huge amounts of taxes, but there is no obligation—
Professor Catherine Johnson: We talked earlier about social media and video-sharing platforms, and you could think about it in that context. If we are thinking about the wider media ecosystem and prominence, one option is to say, “The public service broadcasters and other providers of certain kinds of high-quality content that meets the Broadcasting Code, for example, will be uplifted on YouTube”. That is a way. You are incentivising content creators to create content that fits certain requirements so that it is more likely to be visible to audiences. At the moment, it is YouTube or TikTok’s algorithms that incentivise. That is one of the ways we could think about bringing some positive public service media values into the wider ecosystem.
Gill Hind: Going back to your original point, when you were talking about the public service genres, it was only the main ITV channel, the main Channel 4 channel, et cetera, that had them. Think how many other hundreds of channels broadcasting there are. They all abide by the Ofcom content codes, but they never had PSB requirements in terms of, “You have to do religious, you have to do this, that and the other”. To try to suddenly bring that in to the global streamers would probably be quite hard.
The Chair: Not everybody had a chance to contribute on Lord Tarassenko’s earlier question, which if I can just remind you, was about restoring technology, R&D and innovation as a core part of the BBC’s remit. We heard quite a lot from Chris. I am just giving you the opportunity now to add anything. It is really a question of whether tech and R&D should sit within a new public purpose on driving growth. Is it in fact important enough to have a purpose of its own?
Gill Hind: I can start on that one. I am in agreement with most of what Chris said on that area, but if you were to make it a public purpose, obviously that ring-fences some funding, but you have to consider that the BBC is very small. What can it actually do in a lot of these areas? If you were to say, “Okay, it has a public purpose of innovation”, it has to be in something that is really closely related to public purposes; otherwise, it could be so broad that the money you spend is just a drop in the ocean and it would get you nowhere.
A lot of this might be able to be done through partnerships as well. Does it need to invest in all these areas, or can it bring some of that technology that other companies—whether they are UK companies or not—have developed? We need to be careful with how we are phrasing this.
Professor Catherine Johnson: Yes, I would agree with that. It is really important that it is technology innovation in the public interest. I have slight concerns about it sitting within a purpose on driving growth because does the innovation then get oriented towards driving growth rather than the public interest? It needs to be oriented towards the public interest.
Personally, I am not in favour of a new public purpose on driving growth because one of the things we forget is that the BBC was set up to be funded by a licence fee with a royal charter, to protect it from undue influence from government but also from the market. We have seen increasing pressures over time on the BBC to generate more of its revenue from commercial. We conducted interviews with BBC staff in 2015 and I went back and interviewed some of the same people in the same roles in 2024. We found a pronounced increased emphasis on commercial incentives and far less discussion of public service incentives, just in the conversations that we were having with those people.
There is an increasing commercialisation that we need to be wary of. We need to make sure that the BBC is really underpinned by that public interest. Boosting local economies and providing jobs are great things that the BBC does. They are not necessarily public service media purposes; they are positive externalities or benefits that come from the BBC doing a good job.
The Chair: We have a few members wanting to ask questions. They will have to be quick questions because we have only about six minutes.
Q18 Baroness Caine of Kentish Town: Just following up on the growth point, part of that growth has been the growth of the independent production sector, which has not been mentioned by anybody in terms of the partners around all this. To what extent do you see the independent production companies as key to the future of public service broadcasting and output, and to the contribution to diverse programming, which is what we were discussing: culture, arts, children’s, and other key genres?
Professor Catherine Johnson: Yes, on those key genres it is a really important point because it is often the smaller public service broadcasters that are the providers of that more niche content. There is a real risk that if production of those goes further down, those SMEs will disappear. The big super indies are going to be fine, but it is those smaller regional indies in the UK that are really important there.
Gill Hind: I agree with that. It is not just the BBC; Channel 4 also has a big role to play in the smaller production companies. Some of this comes back to funding, of course, because if the BBC suddenly has to make money from advertising or subscriptions, it will veer towards those genres that pull in the ratings. Those production companies that do not do that stuff will therefore not disappear but struggle.
Q19 Lord Tarassenko: Just as a point of information, you mentioned Celtic languages such as Welsh and so on. Partnerships do not have to be with commercial entities. UCL has developed BritLLM, which does Welsh pretty well, I am told. The BBC itself does not have to train a large language model in Welsh or any of the other Celtic languages. Indeed, the Alan Turing Institute is currently having discussions with the BBC about whether they might work together on AI issues.
Professor Catherine Johnson: Thank you so much for that because one of the things I wanted to say, and then I thought it sounded terribly self-interested, was that the BBC should work more closely with universities. There is so much mutual benefit from that relationship. BBC R&D is actually the easiest bit of the BBC to work with, as a researcher, but it is sometimes quite a difficult and opaque organisation to work with if you are a university.
Q20 Lord McNally: Yes, that was the question I was going to ask. I was thinking of the precedent set by the Open University, which seems to work very well with broadcasters. Are there lessons there that other universities could learn?
Professor Catherine Johnson: Yes. The BBC could be encouraged to be a little more open. The non-R&D part of the BBC is very focused on operational issues at a time of extreme challenges. It has its eyes down and is blinkered. It is hard for it to step out and look up and take those opportunities to step outside. Perhaps we could think a little about how to maintain the independence of R&D but also link it a little more to some of the operational challenges of the BBC. We found quite different ways of thinking about its approach to algorithms and recommendations from the recommender team at the coalface, in the product team, and then the way that that was being thought about in R&D. They did not always talk to each other.
Q21 Lord Knight of Weymouth: Professor Johnson, you mentioned children in passing when we were talking about at-risk genres. Clearly, CBBC and CBeebies are steady-state in terms of their consumption; we have a demographic that is increasingly online and on small screens; we have Bitesize, which competes with the DfE’s own Oak content. Is there some more coherence that we should be after out of charter renewal around provision for children?
Professor Catherine Johnson: I think so but it is also part of a larger issue. We could go back to right where we started, with Gill talking about the viewing behaviours of children. We are right back to being where they are. The BBC has these great products, but it is an area where you could see there would be a really clear incentive for, say, uplifting or pinning BBC content in YouTube’s algorithm coming from its children’s content because the public value of that is really strong.
Gill Hind: That is within the YouTube kids’ section of YouTube, which is a special thing for the kids. It is protected, so it is a strong space.
Professor Catherine Johnson: Yes.
Lord Knight of Weymouth: You have to land the brand with kids on YouTube in the hope you can pull them into the BBC platform ultimately.
Gill Hind: Yes.
Professor Catherine Johnson: Then you can also try to think about that for teens, not just the little kids’ stuff, but that trajectory.
Chris Waiting: If we are moving towards a ban on social media for under-16s, in some ways that will leave a gap. It is not that the BBC should launch its own social media for under-16s because that would not be a good use of money and it would not be good enough. Fundamentally, the economics of a lot of those platforms are designed around some problematic behaviours. But it does create a space. If that were to happen we should want the BBC to be present in that space to ensure that whatever comes to fill it has public interest at the heart of it.
Lord Knight of Weymouth: We have run out of time but that is a very interesting point to end on: the implications of a social media ban for children accessing YouTube and their behaviours in respect of BBC content.
Professor Catherine Johnson: It is worth bearing in mind that the evidence from Australia suggests that kids will still be accessing social media—sorry.
The Chair: That is a different thing for a different day, but it is very topical, thank you. Thank you very much for this whole session and for getting us started on our inquiry. We really appreciate it, thank you.
