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Sections
- Foreword
- Introduction
- Executive Summary
- Being Digital
- A Competitive Digital Communications Infrastructure
- Radio: Going Digital
- Creative Industries in the Digital World
- Public Service Content in Digital Britain
- Research, Education and Skills for Digital Britain
- Digital Security and Safety
- The Journey to Digital Government
- Delivering Digital Britain
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About this site
Public Service Content in Digital Britain
A renewed commitment to public service content provision in the digital world
“Let us be the generation that reshapes our economy to compete in the digital age.”
President Barack Obama.
AMBITION: TO ENSURE THE PROVISION OF ENGAGING PUBLIC SERVICE CONTENT OF QUALITY AND RANGE, FROM MULTIPLE PROVIDERS ON MULTIPLE PLATFORMS, TO A WORLD-CLASS STANDARD.
1. The changes described in the preceding chapters have a significant bearing on the public service [...]
The BBC’s evovling role at the core of our system
12. The changed environment set out above makes a strong, confident and independent BBC more essential than ever. The Government is committed to such a BBC as a gold standard for British media; and to a multi-annual financial settlement that provides the BBC with operational stability and independence from political intervention.
13. The BBC is a [...]
BBC Partnerships
In December 2008, the BBC Executive outlined a series of partnership proposals designed to create sustainable financial and other benefits across the broadcast sector and wider creative economy. These partnership initiatives include:
Bringing Internet services to the television screen through project Canvas.
Opening the iPlayer and its supporting technology to other broadcasters.
Opening the BBC’s local and [...]
The scale and impact of the BBC
16. The BBC has become increasingly important in its relative scale and importance in the UK marketplace. Today, the £3,600m a year Television Licence Fee funds provision by the BBC of two thirds of all networked UK-originated television content outside sports coverage. It funds 56% of all radio content in the UK and secures a [...]
→ Read moreBBC Worldwide
23. Commercial operators have also submitted views about the tension between impact in the market place and value for the licence-fee payer in the role and structure of BBC Worldwide as a wholly-owned, commercially-funded subsidiary of the BBC. In recent years, BBC Worldwide has been an increasingly vigorous and successful acquirer and exploiter of rights [...]
→ Read morePublic funding for competitive provision of essential public content
25. The Government believes that the market alone will not provide plurality in the ownership, commissioning, editorial and production of public service content that remains essential. That is particularly true of news. It is important for civic society and democracy for people to have a range of sources of accurate and trustworthy news at all [...]
→ Read moreC4 Corporation in Digital Britain
41. The interim Digital Britain Report recognised the strength of the Channel 4 brand and continued validity of many of its original public purposes, but also the pressures on its commercial model and the need to re-invent its public purposes for the digital age. We believe that C4 Corporation (C4C) has a key role to [...]
→ Read moreThe importance of news and local journalism for democracy
57. A major new study, commissioned by Oxford University’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, argued earlier this year that we need to think openly and dispassionately about ways to fund the news in Digital Britain.
58. As the economic foundations of news publishers come under great pressure, especially in local and regional markets, there’s [...]
Ensuring a local media framework flexible enough to allow consolidation
67. The Interim Digital Britain Report said that the Government would invite the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) together with Ofcom and others to undertake an exploratory review across the local and regional media sector.
68. During that Review, there were representations from industry and others that regional and local newspapers are in crisis. Structural changes [...]
Modernising the local media ownership rules
74. The Communications Act 2003 requires Ofcom to conduct a statutory review of the media ownership rules every three years. Ofcom are now undertaking such a review and are expected to report back later this year.
75. The Government has asked Ofcom in this current review to consider specifically the impact of the current local ownership [...]
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