Examination of Witnesses (Questions 360
- 364)
TUESDAY 30 NOVEMBER 1999
MR LESLIE
HILL, MS
KATE STROSS,
MR CLIVE
JONES AND
MR CHRIS
HOPSON
Chairman
360 Are you saying that the viewing of BBC Choice,
so far as you know, does not even register among those who subscribe
to ONdigital and BSkyB?
(Ms Stross) At the moment it is not possible
to measure precisely the viewing on ONdigital. There is measurement
of the viewing on Sky digital satellite platform. I believe that
the viewing to BBC Choice does not register on that at this stage.
Chairman: We can ask our next witnesses
if we wish.
Miss Kirkbride
361 Would it be your view that you would like
the BBC to go for digital services in order to expand the market
of digital?
(Mr Hill) We have no objection in principle
and we believe the BBC should be involved in digital services.
However, we believe it should prioritise like commercial people
have to do and recognise it cannot do everything that it wants
to. It seems to want to do everything. No-one can do everything.
We wish we could do lots more but there are limitations if you
are a commercial operator. So we have no objection in principle
to them being involved in digital and being at the forefront of
it, that is not a problem.
362 Listening to your evidence I have been struggling
in my own mind to decide how it would be fair and reasonable to
go forward because obviously at the moment they do compete with
you when it comes to free-to-air viewing, BBC1 and BBC2, and of
course you are free on air to the public once they have paid their
licence fee. Is the problem with digital that because it is this
huge expansion of choice that it has to be paid for on a pay-per-view
basis or on some kind of pay-per-view basis and that is the difference
with digital, because of the expansion of choice it has to be
done on the basis of a financial contribution being made by the
individuals who are watching or by the service agreement and there
will be a financial contribution to services on air? What is different
about digital in your view?
(Ms Stross) I think digital will be a
mixed economy as the analogue system is today. We in ITV, for
example, are providing a second channel, ITV2, available on digital
free. It is only available to those people at this point who are
capable of receiving the digital signal and today the great majority
of those people are subscribers to a pay platform. But, the channel
itself is free and in due course when the great majority of people
have integrated digital TV sets they will get ITV2 free. The BBC
too, similarly, will provide some of its services for free to
licence fee payers. There is then a pay economy as well and in
due course there will be a pay-per-view economy. I think there
is room for all of those. It may be that the balance between the
licence fee funded, the free-to-air advertising funded and the
pay and pay-per-view economy will change slightly in the digital
world simply because there is so much more capacity and there
is a limited amount of funding available either within the licence
fee itself or within advertising revenue. So the pay economy may
be more important in the digital world than it is in the analogue
world but it certainly will not exclude the ability to raise your
funding in other ways.
(Mr Hopson) I think there is an important difference
as well, it is the profusion of new services. There has been a
remarkable consensus in this country in the last 40 years about
the role of the BBC and the funding of the BBC which, interestingly,
actually covers the commercial part of the industry as well. For
the last 40 years we have been more than happy to see the BBC
doing what it is doing. There has been this great consensus. What
is now happening is the BBC is moving beyond that great core set
of public services that we are all happy to have funded out of
the licence fee and it is doing new things. It seems to me two
problems that it has got in doing that are, firstly, it needs
to ensure that consensus widens to embrace those new services,
which I have to say I see no evidence of happening at the moment
and, secondly, it needs to be very, very careful about using licence
fee money to do it because when it does so (a) it may stretch
the licence fee so far that it breaks but also, (b), potentially
it is acting anti-competitively against commercial rivals who
are also launching new services which are varied which never happened
10, 15, 20 years ago because you did not have all these brand
new services. It seems to me those are the two key differences.
The BBC needs to behave differently in that new era and it seems
to me it has not quite adapted itself to this new environment.
363 We have been asked because of the public
service remit of the BBC about subtitling and I wonder if you
could let me know what ITV's commitment is to that and how that
should compare with the BBC, which I presume you think should
be able to do it better?
(Ms Stross) I think at the moment it
is the broadcasters regulated by the ITC who are the only ones
who have specific obligations placed on them for subtitling. The
BBC has chosen to match the obligation which the ITC has placed
on ITV and others and the obligation which, in fact, we exceed
on a very regular basis. The great bulk of subtitling today is
provided on analogue and for the digital terrestrial platform
there is a steadily increasing obligation for subtitling which
we are again exceeding at the moment and the BBC is going to match
voluntarily as I understand it. I think our particular issue on
subtitling is we do not understand why that obligation should
extend only to the digital terrestrial platform. It would seem
logical to us that if we are in a world where different platforms
compete with each other that they should be regulated in a similar
way and the satellite and cable platforms also should deliver
subtitled programmes to their viewers, as we will do.
Chairman
364 How tidy. We have just finished in time.
Thank you very much.
(Mr Hill) Thank you. I would have said
in my opening statement thank you for inviting us, so I say it
now.
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