English Entertainment
UK TV content spend highest per head in the world
LONDON: Investment in new, quality programmes on British television is the highest level per head in the world. Overall market investment is also encouraged by strong public funding which benefits audiences as both citizens and consumers.
These findings are contained in independent report, by Mark Oliver of Oliver & Ohlbaum Associates. The report titled UK Television Content in the Digital Age was released yesterday. It concludes that the $75 per head spend in the UK, compares to $65 in the USA, $52 per head in Germany, $43 in France and $26 in Australia.
The current high investment enables the UK’s TV industry to play a prominent role in reflecting and reinforcing UK culture and national identity, says the report, commissioned and published by the BBC.
Despite the significant economies of scale enjoyed by the USA in television production and global exports, three quarters of UK television content is currently home grown. This compares to only 20 per cent in the film industry where the USA dominates 80 per cent of movie consumption in the UK.
But investment in domestic TV production could drop by 60p per pound for every £1 reduction in the BBC’s public funding, hitting high cost drama, documentaries and scripted comedy in particular. Reallocating public funds to other commercial broadcasters is also highly likely to result in a fall in the total amount invested in UK content production, says the report.
The UK’s strength in homegrown television content investment stands at £3 billion per year. This is underpinned by the BBC’s investment which accounts for 40 per cent of this total, says the report. ITV also plays a central role maintaining original production at 20 per cent above the level legally required. ITV, Channels Four and Five combined account for £1.3 billion of programme spend a year 43 per cent of all domestic content spend, while pay TV in the UK recycles only 3 per cent of revenues into new UK productions.
However, the report warns of pressures on the UK’s unique broadcasting model of market intervention and regulation which ensures diversity, range and investment and encourages creative competition across the industry.
Audience fragmentation, increased competition for commercial revenues and possible future pressure on advertising premiums, will threaten investment in original, diverse content by the UK’s main commercial broadcasters. Channels Four and Five may increasingly attempt to compete directly with ITV for mass-market audiences. At the same time ITV may be forced to reduce its originations to the legal minimum, says the report.
New legislation and ownership rules could also mean a single dominant owner of commercial TV networks will place more emphasis on diversity between its networks than on original content investment. “In these circumstances, the nature and structure of public funding will have a pivotal role in underpinning both total content funding and preventing dilution by the commercial networks,” says the report.
“The presence of a well-financed, publicly-funded broadcaster the BBC has helped ensure that each commercial TV channel needs to invest significant amounts in new content to protect its audience share. Far from crowding out investment in domestic programming by commercial TV, the BBC may well encourage such investment.”
“This also increases barriers to entry in the commercial network TV market which prevents revenue fragmentation and further pressure on programme budgets” the report adds.
UK: The aerial is losing its grip. As broadband becomes the default way Britons watch television, the UK is edging towards a decisive, and divisive, question: should Freeview be switched off by 2034? The issue, highlighted in reporting by The Guardian, has exposed deep fault lines over access, affordability and the future of public service broadcasting.
For nearly 25 years, Freeview has delivered free-to-air television from the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 to almost every corner of the country. Even now, it remains the UK’s largest TV platform, used in more than 16m homes and on around 10m main household sets. Yet the same broadcasters that built it are now pressing for its closure within eight years.
Their case rests on a structural shift in viewing. Smart TVs, superfast broadband and the Netflix-led streaming boom have pulled audiences online. Advertising economics have followed. By 2034, the number of homes using Freeview as their main TV set is forecast to fall from a peak of almost 12m in 2012 to fewer than 2m, making digital terrestrial television, or DTT, increasingly costly to sustain.
But critics say the rush to switch off risks abandoning those least able, or least willing, to move online.
“I don’t want to be choosing apps and making new accounts,” says Lynette, 80, from Kent. “It is time-consuming and irritating trying to work out where I want to be, to remember the sequence of clicks, with hieroglyphics instead of words. If I make a mistake I have to start again.”
Lynette is among nearly 100,000 people who have signed a “save Freeview” petition launched by campaign group Silver Voices. She fears the government is about to “take [Freeview] away from me and others who either don’t like, can’t afford, or can’t use online versions”.
Official figures underline the fault lines. A report commissioned by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport estimates that by 2035, 1.8m homes will still depend on Freeview. Ofcom’s analysis shows those households are more likely to be disabled, older, living alone, female, and based in the north of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Freeview is owned by the public service broadcasters through Everyone TV, which also operates Freesat and the newer streaming platform Freely. After two years of review, DCMS is expected to set out its position soon, drawing on three options proposed by Ofcom: a costly upgrade of Freeview’s ageing technology; maintaining a bare-bones service with only core PSB channels; or a full switch-off during the 2030s.
The broadcasters have rallied behind the third option. They argue that 2034 is the logical cut-off, when transmission contracts with network operator Arqiva expire. By then, they say, the cost of broadcasting to a dwindling audience will far outweigh the returns from TV advertising.
Ofcom agrees a crunch point is approaching. In July, the regulator warned of a “tipping point” within the next few years, after which it will no longer be commercially viable for broadcasters to carry the costs of DTT.
Others see risks beyond economics. Questions remain over whether internet TV can reliably deliver emergency broadcasts, such as the daily Covid updates, in the way that universally available DTT can. The UK radio industry has also warned that an internet-only future for TV could push up distribution costs and force some radio stations off air if PSBs no longer share Arqiva’s mast network.
“It is a political hot potato,” says Dennis Reed, founder of Silver Voices, who says he has “dissociated” his organisation from the government’s stakeholder forum, which he believes is “heavily biased” towards streaming.
The Future TV Taskforce, representing the PSBs, counters that moving online could “close the digital divide once and for all”. “We want to be able to plan to ensure that no one is left behind,” a spokesperson says, adding that rising DTT costs could otherwise mean cuts to programme budgets.
The numbers show the scale of the challenge. Of the 1.8m Freeview-dependent homes projected for 2035, around 1.1m are expected to have broadband but not use it for TV. The remaining 700,000 are forecast to lack a broadband connection altogether.
Veterans of the analogue switch-off, completed in 2012 after 76 years, recall similar fears of “TV blackout chaos”. Around 6 per cent of households were labelled “digital refuseniks”, yet a targeted help scheme and a national campaign, fronted by a robot called Digit Al voiced by Matt Lucas, delivered a largely smooth transition.
This time, the BBC is less keen to foot the bill. Tim Davie, the outgoing director general, has said the corporation should not fund a comparable support programme for a Freeview switch-off.
Research for Sky by Oliver & Ohlbaum suggests that with early awareness campaigns and digital inclusion measures, only about 330,000 households would ultimately need hands-on help ahead of a 2034 shutdown.
Meanwhile, viewing habits continue to fragment. Audience body Barb says 7 per cent of UK households no longer own a TV set, choosing to watch on other devices. In December, YouTube overtook the BBC’s combined channels in total UK viewing across TVs, smartphones and tablets, albeit measured at a minimum of three minutes.
That shift may accelerate. YouTube has recently blocked Barb and its partner Kantar from accessing viewing session data, limiting transparency just as online platforms consolidate power.
“When the government chose British Satellite Broadcasting as the ‘winner’ in satellite TV it was Rupert Murdoch’s Sky instead that came out on top,” says a senior TV executive quoted by The Guardian. “There already is such an outsider ready to be the winner in the transition to internet TV; it is YouTube.”
Freeview’s future now hangs on a familiar British dilemma: modernise fast and risk exclusion, or protect universality and pay the price. Either way, the aerial’s days as king of the living room look numbered.
