Ofcom PSB Review blog

When a picture tells its own story

By Tom Loosemore

Over 5,000 people from the Borders area care enough about the future of regional news on ITV to send us a postcard on the matter. We could only fit a couple of thousand on the desk for this photo - several thousand more are in the drawers below.

Baz-Boggled

By Tom Loosemore

Peter Bazalgette floated some typically provocative ideas in a speech to the Royal Television Society on Tuesday.

He proposed "Boggle", a new "public service distribution platform and search engine" which would "link the existing online offerings of museums, galleries, theatre companies, opera houses and concert halls." and "...provide seedcorn monies to improve the content offerings of these organisations."

He continued:

At last, some genuine plurality in the supply of PSB programming, with the added bonus of a search engine to market it all ! Navigation is one of the key challenges facing PSB content in the future. How will we find it ? Well, let’s go on the front foot.

I share Baz's optimism about the widening range of potential providers of online public service content. Finding ways to help museums, galleries etc. take the opportunity of delivering their public purposes through interactive media has to be a winner. That's not to say many  of them are not already on the case (see Central St.Martins' Universal Leonardo, and the TatePlayer).

He's also spot on in that making sure people  discover interactive public service content is crucial - both in terms of being able to find it when they know it should be there, and in terms of bumping into stuff they didn't know they were going to like ("people who bought this also bought this", stumbleupon etc.)

Where I think he's profoundly wrong is in assuming that the right solution is to launch a new search engine. If you believe that people really do value public service content - and Ofcom's got boat loads of evidence to suggest that they do - then it is surely in the interests of existing search engines to make sure their results meet their users' needs in this respect.

First and foremost, providers of online public service content should put as much effort into maximising the reach of their content - including optimising their search engine rankings -  as they do into making the content in the first place.

Press coverage

By Rhona Parry

What's worse than being talked about? Not being talked about of course. So we're pretty pleased with the great range of media coverage that has emerged since publication of Phase One yesterday. Impartial is our middle name here at Ofcom, so here are a few links to the views of others...

The MediaGuardian has a couple of articles and the organgrinder discussing issues raised in the Review. Mainly focused on where funding of PSB should come from, it's definitely worth a browse. And they're not the only ones to lead on funding. An article on bbc.co.uk talks about the possibility of top-slicing the licence fee, as does the Daily Mail.

Reuters outlines the four possible models that are suggested in the consultation. And if you want an easy to read summary of the key issues, The Press Association's article does it pretty neatly, as does The Times. If you want to read what others think, The Telegraph's blog on the subject has sparked plenty of welcome debate.

For a flavour of the National perspective, take a look here and here (the latter even includes a rare photo of actual Ofcom people).

If you're sick of reading, you can listen again to a brief interview with Ed Richards on Radio 4's Today programme. And seeing that we're getting all multimedia, today's Guardian Media Talk has a good discussion about some of the issues raised in the Review.

We haven't tried to list all the coverage here - not least because there's a fair bit more in the papers themselves which we can't link to - and because we haven't yet read all of it ourselves. So give us time... (and by all means, point us in the right direction).

As always, let us know what you think.

Presentation & Video from this morning's PSB launch event

By Tom Loosemore

We held five launch events across the UK this morning (London, Glasgow, Belfast, Cardiff and Manchester) where various members of the PSB Review team gave the presentation below and took questions.

| View on SlideShare

To my mind, the key slides are  7, (how much implicity subsidy is leeching out of the system due to digital switchover),  10 (how much the public value a plurality of PSBs) and 12 (four possible models for future provision of PSB).

We also recorded the press conference in London, where Ed Richards answered a raft of questions. See below:

Welcome to the PSB Review blog

By Rhona Parry

Hello, welcome, and thanks for checking out this blog.

Here at Ofcom we have a bit of a reputation for killing lots of trees publishing lengthy documents laden with acronyms. Sadly, at over 100 pages long, our review of PSB (public service broadcasting) published today is no exception. That said, the future of PSB is a meaty subject, and the full document (pdf) is definitely worth a read if you have the time.

If you don't, then you can read and comment on a much shorter interactive executive summary of the report. And if you don't have time to do that, then hopefully this blog will help you understand a bit more about our emerging thinking and give you the opportunity to let us know what you think.

We've never done a blog before so this is very much a trial. Your comments and thoughts will be read by the team at Ofcom and we hope they will improve our understanding of the issues. If you want to make a more formal response to the consultation then you'll need to fill out this form by 19th June 2008.

We hope you enjoy reading this blog over the coming months. We'll try our very best to keep it updated, relevant and interesting. In the meantime, please do let us know what you think by leaving comments below.

What have we been doing for the last six months?

By Rhona Parry

The eagle-eyed among you will recall that we published Terms of Reference for the Public Service Broadcasting Review back in September 2007. So what have we been doing since then? Well, in between all the telly watching and playing on the internet, we've been quite busy.

We asked Ipsos MORI to do a major consumer research exercise. They asked over 2,000 people what they thought of PSB and how it could be improved (pdf) They also did deliberative research where people from all around the UK shared their views.

Then we asked a specialist consultancy called MTM London to boil the ocean assess the availability of PSB-style websites (pdf). They did it so well we then asked them to work out how much money is spent online on such websites (pdf).

For the difficult number-crunching stuff, a consultancy called Oliver & Ohlbaum used models (of the spreadsheet, rather than the Lego, variety) to try to work out what might happen to PSB in the future (pdf).

We've also done a fair chunk of work ourselves. We analysed mountains of viewing data from measurement agency BARB, as well as info from broadcasters and many other sources to understand how well PSB is delivered at the moment. You can see the fruit of these labours in the hefty slide pack below (also available for download as a pdf).

| View on SlideShare

Feel free to link to or embed these slides yourself - please just make Ofcom gets attributed as the source.

What's this PSB Review about then?

By Rhona Parry

So why are we doing this review? Well the short answer is that Parliament - via the Communications Act 2003 - asks us to review PSB at least every five years. We have to do two things:

Firstly, we have to report on the "extent to which the public service broadcasters have delivered the purposes of public service television broadcasting";

And secondly, we have to make recommendations with a view to "maintaining and strengthening the quality of public service broadcasting in the future".

Now that might sound relatively straightforward, but there's a lot for us to do if we want to do the job properly. That's why we are splitting our PSB Review into three phases:

• The first phase, published today, sets out our initial analysis and presents a range of options for the future.
• Once we've received feedback, we'll publish a second document ('Phase 2') in the autumn which will hone down the options for the future.
• And once we've got some feedback on that, we'll finally make our minds up early in 2009.

So what is Public Service Broadcasting, anyway?

By Tom Loosemore

How to define Public Service Broadcasting? On one hand, it's a system, a set of government policies which have evolved over the past half century. In essence these policies have sought to ensure that the UK makes the most out of the magic of television - magic which has until recently been heavily constrained by shortage of broadcast spectrum. 

On the other hand, some would say public service broadcasting refers to a certain kind of programme; high quality, original, innovative, widely-available, challenging and engaging television which informs, educates and entertains. In our last review, Ofcom suggested a set of purposes and characteristics which we use to define PSB. The BBC's latest Royal Charter demands that the corporation follows broadly similar purposes.

Additionally, some say that PSB is defined by particular channel, and the main terrestrial channels are blessed with special 'PSB' status in the 2003 Communications Act. This grants them some rights (access to spectrum, for example), in exchange for obligations about how much PSB programming they broadcast, and of what type. These channels include all the BBC channels, ITV 1, Channel 4, Five, Teletext and S4C in Wales

Perhaps though it's easier to think about what PSB looks like in practice. Looking through today's TV schedule, for the kids, there's Newsround and Smalltalk Diaries. For the grown-ups, Channel 4 is showing Cutting Edge: Cotton Wool Kids, which looks into parents' reluctance to let their kids take risks. And then there's assorted national and regional news programmes on BBC, ITV1, Channel 4 or Five.

Broadly speaking, PSB refers to high-quality, engaging programmes,  made to reflect the needs of people in the UK.

But the rise of multichannel digital TV means there is now a wide range of public service broadcasting on 'non-PSB' channels such as More 4, Sky Arts and UKTV History. Given this trend, our current review has sought to guage the impact of PSB regardless of channel. We argue that it's the purpose and impact of each programme that matters, rather than the channel on which it's broadcast.

Not everyone agrees with our stance.

We'd love to hear what you think.