From catch-up TV to online TV: Digital broadcasting and the case of BBC iPlayer (original) (raw)
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This article maps out some of the implications of interactivity and convergence for television's textual and industrial forms in relation to the BBC's status as a public service broadcaster. Whilst the digitalisation of television may bring about new textual, industrial and audience configurations, the goals for broadcasters remain the same: to attract viewers in a marketplace where there is increasing competition for screen-based leisure time. John Caldwell's work on 'second-shift aesthetics' demonstrates how TV–dot.com synergies must now attempt to 'master textual dispersals and user navigations that can and will inevitably migrate across brand boundaries' in order to keep audiences engaged with their proprietary content for as long as possible (Caldwell, 2003: 136). However, for public service broadcasters, mastering these user flows does not simply take the form of an economic transaction. Rather, these second-shift strategies must serve and fulfil public service (PS) obligations and engage viewers in new relationships. Based on a combination of textual analysis and critical industrial research, including interviews with key industry personnel, this article examines the BBC's early second-shift practices in relation to interactive television (iTV) and 'multi-platform projects', as the corporation moves from being a PS broadcaster to a PS content-provider. In April 2006, the BBC announced Creative Future, its five-year strategic plan. One of the earliest and most significant reforms to be implemented was a profound organisational restructuring to 'enable 360 degree commissioning and production and ensure creative coherence and editorial leadership across all platforms and media' (BBC, 2006). This institutional transformation represented the full-scale adoption of a multi-platform and multimedia approach to commissioning, producing and distributing public service (PS) content first embarked upon in the early twenty-first century. In 2001, the BBC had announced its intention to become the 'UK's number one digital destination', aiming for ubiquity through developing a presence on all emerging platforms (Highfield, quoted in Teather, 2001).
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Conventionally, academics and politicians frame the contribution of European public service broadcasting (PSB) in terms of its cultural and political significance. The underlying principle is that PSB is first and foremost about content output -its production, composition, distribution and consumption. This paper goes beyond an audience-centric approach, to argue that the uniqueness of PSB in Europe lies in its historical role of delivering public policy. Public service broadcasters can be relied on to respond to government calls for assistance in implementing key policies. The broadcasting history of Europe demonstrates the crucial intervention of public service broadcasters in pioneering and at times even rescuing policy initiatives.
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Focusing on the case of the BBC iPlayer and placing it within broader national and international developments, this article assesses key challenges that public service broadcasting (PSB) faces in the era of online TV. The advent of subscription video-ondemand (SVoD) and associated market transformations have accentuated preexisting funding, political, and market pressures on PSB. Still, the relationship between PSB and SVoD is not purely antagonistic. The evolution of the BBC iPlayer in this wider context shows that online TV does not (as yet) represent a radical new interpretation of PSB because VoD services are closely linked to linear offerings, and there is evidence of the fluidity between online and broadcast spheres, and the continued relevance of television. Against an increasingly commercial, fragmented, closed, and data-driven environment, the article makes the case for supporting PSB VoD services and explores how online TV might help revive PSB through personalization and public service algorithms. Media policy can play an enabling role by addressing data practices, algorithms, and prominence.
iVision and the BBC: building public value
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Breaking with conventional wisdom that sees public service broadcasters as conveyors of content in line with historically shaped socio-political ideals, centred on quality, access, diversity and independence, evidence suggests that PSB is often the driving force behind key technological innovations serving public policy aims. In the drive towards wholesale digitalisation and the accelerated introduction of an information society, this hitherto understated function is now deemed critical and comes to the fore. More specifically, recent public policy initiatives in the UK, culminating to the 2006 White Paper, openly assign the mission of contributing to the process of ‘building digital Britain’ to the BBC, the flagship public service broadcaster. This vision of digitalisation is defined in broad terms in the policy discourse, as involving all platforms indiscriminately. The BBC’s contribution, designed to entice users to a digital future and simultaneously cement the continued relevancy of the institution in the 21st century, finds expression in a variety of implemented and proposed digital services deliverable over a range of digital platforms, including television and radio, the internet and mobile networks. This paper seeks to interrogate the host of controversial and closely scrutinised internet services offered by the BBC in the light of the digital vision articulated in the public policy discourse. These services shift the emphasis away from the time-honoured broadcasting paradigm to a more interactive approach. Through widespread application of emerging Web 2.0 practices, the users are now invited to participate, and generate and share their own content. The imminent iPlayer, the on-demand television and radio catch-up online facility (pending regulatory approval), promises to free users from the straightjacket of linear, scheduled programming, allowing them to time-shift and possibly space-shift their viewing and listening experience around their personal choices and needs. These initiatives are not developed in a vacuum. They are not merely part of an evolutionary process. They are expressions of a certain policy agenda and historically situated conceptualisations of the public interest and ‘public value’. Their appropriateness is evaluated on this basis.
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This paper explores the use of new media by the BBC as a strategy for sustaining institutional legitimacy under a new regulative regime favouring open market competition. Focusing on the case of Capture Wales, a BBC Wales internet-based project that describes Wales from the citizens' autobiographical perspectives, and using a discourse analysis approach, we examine how the BBC re-positions itself in the emerging digital cultural sphere by using technology in the service of public participation. We observe a sense of empowerment in the opportunity participants were given arguing that such empowerment is no small thing, insofar as it clearly demonstrates that the public value produced through technological innovation lies in renegotiating the power relations between institutional authority and ordinary people-in allowing the latter to appropriate the "means of media production" and to tell their own stories in public. Ultimately the article suggests that competing interests give rise to crucial tensions between ethico-political (serving society) and instrumental (justifying the licence fee) conceptions of benefi t within Capture Wales, which in turn produce constant struggles over the visibility as well as the vision of/for this digital storytelling project by the stakeholders involved in its execution.
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