News Broadcasting
BBC licence fee to rise by 3%
MUMBAI: UK Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell has announced that the BBC licence fee will rise by three per cent over each of the next two years. The deal will see the current fee of ?131.50 rise to a maximum ?151 by 2012.
Borrowing limits will also be tighter than requested. The BBC had wanted an above-inflation hike in the licence to boost programmes and digital services.
Not surprisingly BBC DG Mark Thompson expressed “real disappointment” at the Government’s final licence fee level settlement but said it was a privilege to receive and gave certainty in planning to create the best possible content and services for all audiences.
Thompson said that no commercial rival enjoyed that certainty of funding. While the BBC could argue that the benefits that extra funding would bring to the wider creative industries as well as audiences, he said that it was ultimately for the Government to decide the level in the broader context of inflation and the wider public sector.
He also welcomed the longer settlement at six years enabling efficient planning for digital switchover, rapidly changing audience expectations and new creative initiatives.
“Our vision for the future, broadly endorsed by a Government White Paper, as well as their own requirements and ambitions, especially around digital switchover, plus not wanting existing, valued BBC services to be squeezed as we invest for the future, led us to bid for a settlement that would increase in real terms.
“The settlement announced means the BBC still receives substantial, guaranteed income of more than ?20billion over the next six years, which is financial security denied to any other media player. But it leaves a gap of around ?2 billion over the next six years between what we believed we needed to deliver our vision and what will actually be available. That’s not a gap many organisations can swallow comfortably.”
Thompson said there were three ways the organisation could now move to reduce the gap:
1 – Simply not make some new investments, do them later or do them more modestly;
2 – Increase self help targets. This would mean: increasing licence fee efficiencies in collection and evasion; maximising commercial revenues and continuing reform, modernisation and productivity;
3 – Move resources inside the BBC from existing content and services to new ideas.
The BBC’s executive board and senior managers across the organisation will now review investment plans in the light of the settlement and explore the options.
The executive will then make initial recommendations to the BBC Trust who will take decisions later in the year in the best interests of licence fee payers, drawing on the framework of the BBC’s public purposes and public value.
Thompson adds, “The BBC faces challenges to find enough money to create the fantastic content our audiences want. After seven years of funding that has grown in real terms, we now face not just a tight settlement but daunting investment challenges in distribution, infrastructure and technology that risk diverting money away from content creation. These challenges call for some new thinking about how we produce content and how we create value.”
Thompson said that the BBC’s vision for content in the digital world, Creative Future, was never fundamentally about spending new money:
“It is about flexing, adapting, liberating all content, but above all, content we already make. It’s about unlocking the full value of existing investment.”
News Broadcasting
Newsrooms rethink AI, trust and revenue models
Editors and tech leaders debate tools, deepfakes and viability.
MUMBAI: If yesterday’s newsroom ran on caffeine and chaos, tomorrow’s may well run on code but with a human still holding the pen. At the 22nd edition of the Video Broadcast and Broadband Tech Summit hosted by IndianTelevision.com, some of the sharpest minds in Indian media gathered to examine how artificial intelligence, automation and shifting audience behaviour are reshaping journalism. The session, titled The Newsroom of Tomorrow Tools, Trust, and Business Viability In Focus, did not descend into techno-utopian hype. Instead, it wrestled with a more uncomfortable question: how do you stay relevant, credible and profitable when the audience is changing faster than the headline cycle?
The panel featured Govindraj Ethiraj, Editor of The Core, Dr Nilesh Khare, COO of Sakal Media Group; Prakaran Tiwari, Chief Executive Producer at NDTV Profit; Manoj Padmanabhan, Head of Business Media and Entertainment at AWS; Neeraj Mishra, Key Account Manager at Vizrt and session chair; and Mayuresh Konnur, Bilingual Correspondent at Collective Newsroom, publisher for BBC in India.
Govindraj Ethiraj set the tone with a frank assessment. “The reason people do not consume as much news through us is because they are consuming news through other sources they trust more,” he said. In a fragmented ecosystem flooded with content, trust has become the real differentiator.
Yet AI is undeniably transforming workflows. Ethiraj admitted he now uses AI tools to proofread his own articles. “Sometimes it is scary how much it picks, but it helps,” he said. What once required layers of sub-editing can now be assisted by machines trained to flag errors, inconsistencies and structural weaknesses.
He pointed to how newsroom roles have evolved. The desk editor, widely advertised over the last 15 years, barely existed in its current form before the internet boom. As digital publishing accelerated, tasks such as curating listicles, ranking stories and optimising headlines became specialised functions. Now, many of those responsibilities can be performed or at least supported by AI systems. The disruption is not hypothetical; it is operational.
Dr Nilesh Khare approached the issue from both a business and technological standpoint. Sakal Media Group is developing its own large language model, built on 60 years of text and photo archives. The goal is independence. “We won’t need to depend on other platforms to develop ours,” he said, underscoring the strategic value of proprietary data.
For Khare, AI represents opportunity as much as anxiety. It can help expand content across geographies and languages, particularly in bridging North and South Indian markets. It can streamline production and reduce costs. He did not shy away from the implications. “As a journalist I feel bad but as a content producer I feel good that we will require less manpower,” he said, articulating a tension many in the room recognised but few openly admit.
He also highlighted how audience behaviour is evolving. Today, a retail investor can follow a stock using Gemini or GPT instead of toggling between multiple news channels. News is no longer consumed linearly; it is queried, personalised and synthesised. The newsroom must therefore produce content that survives not just on screens but within AI-generated summaries.
Prakaran Tiwari offered a more philosophical reflection. “AI has developed itself and adapted on the basis of how news is consumed. It’s all about giving a perspective,” he said. In his view, the competitive edge will not lie in speed alone but in interpretation. Facts are increasingly commoditised; context is not.
He also suggested that formats are fluid. While short-form video dominates social feeds, long-form audio is resurging. Govindraj Ethiraj noted that in the United States the 2024 election was described as the “podcast election”, reflecting how audiences are investing time in deeper, long-form discussions. The newsroom of tomorrow must cater to both scrolling and sustained listening.
Manoj Padmanabhan of AWS reframed the debate. Technology, he argued, is not an existential threat but an amplifier. “The power is given to the human journalist with all this technology in their hand, with it acting as a support or assistant to deliver the correct and relevant news to the people,” he said.
The traditional divide between a “normal” newsroom and a “digital” newsroom is fading. “It will not be two newsrooms,” he said. “It will be one newsroom.” In that integrated environment, the storyteller remains central. AI may assist with research, editing and distribution, but editorial judgement remains human.
Neeraj Mishra of Vizrt echoed the assistive narrative. India, he said, is a market of organised chaos, where news broadcasters are pushing ever-increasing volumes of content. AI will help manage scale. It is not here to replace people but to assist them.
Production barriers are already collapsing. “You don’t need a green screen to produce content now,” Mishra observed, hinting at virtual production tools and real-time rendering technologies. And this, he said, is only the beginning. In a cost-conscious market like India, AI adoption in both B to B and B to C segments is likely to rise sharply. The skills are available, he argued, the real question is whether organisations are willing to invest.
If opportunity was one half of the conversation, risk was the other. Mayuresh Konnur warned that fake news is now being peddled with alarming ease using AI tools. Deepfakes, synthetic audio and fabricated visuals can damage credibility overnight. Several journalists, he said, have already faced instances where manipulated content was circulated in their name.
“Eventually it becomes a question of how authentic you are in the market,” Konnur noted. In a crowded information economy, credibility is the ultimate moat. Regulations and clear guidelines, he argued, are necessary to curb misuse without stifling innovation.
Mishra added a note of caution against overuse. “AI should not be everywhere. It has to be used optimally,” he said. The value lies not in blanket automation but in strategic integration.
One of the most resonant metaphors came from Padmanabhan. AI, he suggested, is like a brush in a human hand. Powerful, versatile, transformative but inert without the artist. It cannot survive without the human touch.
Konnur distilled the session’s core takeaway, AI is inevitable, but the art of storytelling will never disappear.
In a media landscape defined by speed, shrinking attention spans and intense competition, the newsroom of tomorrow is not simply a technological upgrade. It is a recalibration. Between efficiency and ethics. Between automation and authenticity. Between reducing manpower and retaining meaning.
The algorithms may write cleaner copy and generate sharper graphics. They may even predict what audiences want before audiences know it themselves. But the enduring task remains unchanged to tell stories that inform, interrogate and inspire.
And for that, the human newsroom is still very much open for business.
