Thurs 20/11/03
(David Innes, Radio Broadcasters Association): Morning Greg - you were very well briefed apart from: 'don't mention the rugby - at all.' Greg, philosophically, you've talked about the very dominant and competitive role of the BBC in broadcasting, and I have to say I'm asking this question from a radio industry perspective, but I just want to run a mixed model where it's fundamentally different. You get a truckload or a busload of cash from your listeners and viewers and spend it in what you see are their best interests and to great effect. But the model we have in New Zealand, which is somewhat different, where the state broadcasting system is funded essentially by the taxpayer, and therefore the issue of complementarity, not pushing to the margins, but complementarity as to how a private commercial system and a publicly funded system can exist in a complementary form than competitive or marginalisation situation - philosophically, do you have a view on a slightly different model from public broadcasting as an 800 pound gorilla as opposed to a philosophically complementary partner with commercial broadcasting.
GD: Well, I think the BBC has achieved that for many years, in terms of the success of ITV, the success of Channel 4 on television, and now the success of some of the commercial radio stations. The problem that emerged in recent years, with the significant downturn in advertising revenue worldwide, is that those organisations are not as successful as they were, and in turn are then tending to look at the BBC and say, 'why should you have this money when we haven't?' My answer to that is, as I said as I finished my speech, the society's got to decide what system it wants. Forty per cent of the money spent on television and way over 40 per cent spent on radio in this country comes from the public through a licence fee. And what that has allowed us to do - I mean, we spend more per head on television production than any country in the world, including the United States. Now that's funded by the public, 40 per cent of it. I think if you just go to a complete market-driven system, everywhere has got a lot to lose, other than the United States which is big enough probably to sustain it. Can other models exist? I'm sure they can exist and work, and other ways of funding. We would be very nervous if our funding was decided by the government. Our funding is paid by a licence fee which we collect, the government decides the level. But I think if we were amongst all the other government departments, competing every year for budgets, in difficult years we could well suffer. So I think the British system - it's not a particularly fair system, that everybody has to pay 160 pounds regardless of income, etc, etc. But actually it's produced a pretty good broadcasting system.
(George Andrews, independent producer): Good morning, Greg Dyke. It's very interesting to hear the changes that you've shepherded the BBC through. We're about, as you know, to change our broadcasting system. We don't have your audience, we don't have your resources. We have to think smarter. And my question is: how much is the new media dimension of the 21st century, the capacity for interactive broadband and web-based services, how important is that to the delivery of your public service objectives?
GD: Today it's important, tomorrow it gets more and more important. I sat in a discussion only this week where we were trying to work out - we always know with television programmes that when they go into video they get sold commercially. Soon you've got the position when you'll be able to download anything you like. Is that public service or is that commercial? When I look at all the opportunities that the digital world brings, I don't believe the market will be able to utilise them all to the benefit of the public. And actually, as we look at - one of the themes of our charter renewal, is precisely that. It asks the question. We're only half way through, we're through the first stage of the digital world, there is much more to come. What is the role of a publicly funded public service broadcaster in that world compared to the one we've come from? Now, already we have the most popular websites in Europe. We spend something like 100 million pounds a year on interactive television and on the web, and of course we can see the convergence happening, that actually discussing the web and discussing interactive television separately will be ridiculous in ten years' time.
George Andrews: So what thought would you leave with this conference as we contemplate our multimedia future and with our public service objectives still in mind?
GD: I think you have to recognise that the market alone - it will be more so in New Zealand because it's a smaller country than the UK - the market alone will not provide all the opportunities, will not meet all the demands or provide or be able to fund all the opportunities that will come with the digital world. I mean, I'll give you an example: we launched a new web service last week called 'I CAN. 'I CAN' basically empowers the people who use it to take part in the political process. Well, that's not ever, ever going to be funded commercially. But it's important, and it's important it isn't possibly funded directly by government, and that's why we're there.
(Andrew Shaw, on behalf of John Barnett, South Pacific Pictures): Good morning Mr Dyke. I represent an independent television production company, and so my question is about the role of independent producers and their relationship with the BBC, in the light of the recent Ofcom review and with comments from my colleagues in the United Kingdom who feel weak rather than strong in their relationship with the broadcaster or broadcasters, not just the BBC. So the question to you is: how critical to the BBC is an independent production sector and how critical is it to you that sector be comprised of strong, creative but well-capitalised production companies?
GD: Well the independent production sector is pretty important to us. I mean, if you look at the last year, some of our best programmes have come from independent producers. The problem with the sector is that anyone can join it, so the supply side and the demand side don't match up. There's more and more and more independent producers and only the same pot of broadcasting money. In terms of the relationship well, I've always been of the view in life that I'd rather be a buyer than a seller - I think you have more fun. I hope what will emerge from independent production is a few large, well capitalised companies but with the ability of someone with real talent. This year we had - I don't know if it's been seen in New Zealand - we had a new programme called Spooks, made by a brand new independent who has become a big player in a very short period of time because of talent. But obviously what you want is as wide a pool of talent, of creative people as you can. How they become well capitalised I'm not sure because it seems to me the international market for what they make is pretty small. You know, there's only two sorts of television really around the world, and that's American television and indigenous television. The international market's pretty small, so there is no - in the new system we will have they will end up owning the rights, but there's no massive - it's not like America, where you put your programming into syndication if it's successful and you can become mega rich. That's not going to happen in the UK, I doubt whether it'll happen in any other market. So I don't quite know how they become financially big players, unless they're in bed with other people.
(Geoff Leyland, Associate Professor, Screen and Media Studies, University of Waikato): Kia ora Mr Dyke. I'm going to ask a sort of serious question and those people who know me will say 'I know he's going to ask that question'. But I think it's a question still worth asking, and it says: as television audiences further fragment into a mosaic of entertainment choice, is it time we abandoned the naïve and statistically dubious constructions of audiences through ratings. Should we be looking for better ways of understanding what viewers do with television, or to put it more succinctly: people meters produce a load of horse-pop - I think we need better information. Do you agree?
GD: Well, this is the BBC, we have so much information you can't believe it, we have it coming out of our ears. What we're doing a lot of work on is: who are the audiences? What do they watch? How do they watch it? And who are the audiences of the future? I don't know if you've got the same phenomenon - what is quite clear now, is there's a generation coming through who watch less television, and you can see why, 'cause I can see from my own kids, they sit and play computer games half the time, but they watch less television. When I first came - I remember getting a show cancelled in the UK 'cause it only got a 10 million rating. If we could get a 10 million rating today we'd be delighted, with a new drama. Oddly, the rating system as it exists is kept alive almost by the press, here. It's reported by the press, kept up by the press, and the press is very odd about it, 'cause sometimes 2 million is a big audience and sometimes it's a low audience, depending on how they report it. We look much more about reach, how often our services are used, and we're particularly interested in - you know, everybody has to pay this licence fee in this country. If everybody has got to pay we ought to be able to get them all. So we need to know who they are, when they're watching, and how many people don't use our services at all - and why therefore they're having to pay is a question they're going to ask us if we don't ask it. So we're interested in all sorts of figures and facts about our audiences. We've also now got what we call audience advocates, who are people who are working within the programme teams now, trying to explain - 'cause you know, programme makers love the idea that they can make what they like, put it out there and you either like it or you don't. Well we've now got audience advocates who are trying to explain [few second missing] . . . as the ratings go, there's obviously a big fall when you go from a four channel world to a 200 channel world. But you can now begin to predict the end game of that. If people continue to watch the same amount of television, you can tell what the BBC audience is likely to be in ten years, and those sorts of things. What's much harder to predict is what new generations coming through are going to view and if they're going to see television as essential to their lives as, say, my generation has.
(Simon Morton, Radio New Zealand): Well, with the Beeb's plan to digitize and release its enormous archive of material to the public, who are then free to download, rip, mix and burn it, I'm wondering what philosophic issues, specifically about rights, that the BBC dealt with in deciding to actually freely distribute this material.
GD: Well, we can only - when I first announced it…it's a classic case of I announced it before we'd done all the work, largely because it's one of those things, if you don't announce it it would never happen. We obviously can't release programmes where we don't have the rights. I should tell you that the first people on the phone were the agents for Morecambe and Wise, you know, who are now dead, but the agents for them saying 'you're not letting our programmes go'. And that's not what we plan to do. What we've said is, the BBC itself owns an awful lot of content which we are happy to make available to the public who have paid for it. This is material like natural history, where we have the rights. We're going to make it available, so it can be downloaded for anyone, but particularly for students, for school kids and the rest of it, can use our material to make their own audio-visual presentations. And then we want them to send it back to us and we start having a bigger library of this sort of material. Now there's all sorts of problems about the cost of downloading and the rest of it which we're trying to sort, but it came from this basis: that we have this incredible library, many of the programmes we have the rights, and we keep it locked away in a place just up the road, and no-one gets near it. Yet it doesn't belong to us, it belongs to the public, 'cause they paid for it.
Simon Morton: And what about future rights, though. Is that something you've had to amend in terms of how you actually commission programmes, in terms of being able to have that distribution ability?
GD: Yeah, but I mean, let's face it most - if we don't have the rights, most artists, most producers, who are not BBC producers, will not give us those rights. I mean, I'd like us to make it available for free. They're not going to do that. But we have got a large amount of material that we have got the rights to, and it's largely that material that we'll make available. So I don't think we're going to be making whole programmes available a lot of the time, but - I'll give you an example, your kid is asked to do a project on the Amazon. They can go into our system, pull down all this material on the Amazon, make an audio-visual project with it, take it back into school and bang. Now, I can't see - that's our rights, it's our material, it was paid for by the public and it belongs to them. We would have done it many years ago, I suspect, of course but there was no possibility. Digitalisation makes that possible.
(Trisha Dunleavy, Media Studies, VictoriaUniversity): Good morning Mr Dyke. I've got a question about - I was reading the other day some items about the cultural diversity network in the UK, and I've got a question about ethnic diversity in television programmes. And it involves your BBC work, and your new role as the Chair of this CDN, cultural diversity network. Something that we're looking at in New Zealand, we're making moves in this direction with the Maori Television Service that we're launching - but the question is, how do you see increasing demands for public television to reflect ethnic diversity - how do you see that being reconciled with the increasing fragmentation of TV audiences?
GD: Let me take you back four years, when I first got here. I was interviewed for a radio station and someone said to me - what was the word? - did I think that the broadcasting industry in this country was 'hideously white'? And I said, well I thought the BBC was hideously white. And I thought no more about it until it was the front page lead in the newspapers, you know. And I've never made any apology for saying it. It seems to me this is a very rapidly changing society in terms of the ethnic diversity mix. And the BBC has to reflect that, and we have to reflect that in our workforce, and we have to reflect it in our programming. Now we've actually made big strides in our programming, in the last couple of years. Our workforce is not just about 10 per cent come from ethnic minority backgrounds, compared to eight per cent four years ago. But that's been a lot of hard work. What interested me was, last week, I went to give some prizes at the local technical college to where we're based in Shepherds Bush. And I gave out 150 prizes, and I think there were 42 different nationalities. And you just realise, that's where we work, and yet we in no way reflect that. I think the changing nature of particularly the urban areas in Britain means that we have to move faster. As for your question about specific channels vis a vis mass audiences: there are still going to be mass audiences, there are still going to be mass audience channels. They are not going to get the same ratings as they got 10 years ago but there will be mass audience channels. And our job on those channels - and we run two of them - the job on those channels must be to reflect the changing nature of our society. And that includes the changing nature of the ethnic mix.
And - can I answer this again? - whether there's a role for specific channels, I think that varies. We did a big piece of research recently about ethnic minority programming amongst ethnic minorities. What was interesting is, the thing that came back quite strongly is, we as a disproportionately white, Anglo-Saxon organisation have a perception of life as ethnic minorities which is about gloom and doom, which many of the ethnic minorities don't have themselves. And we've got to come to terms with that and change our view.
(Paul Bushnell, spoken features, Radio New Zealand): Good morning Mr Dyke. The BBC took a risk in deciding to go digital. It seems to have paid off. How would you advise New Zealand to persuade decision makers in charge of funding that it's a good idea also for us to go digital here?
GD: Well, it's much easier to take a risk when - if you're a commercial organisation the downside of taking a risk is you go bust if it goes wrong. We don't face that downside, so the risks theoretically should be easier. They not always have been but theoretically we should be able to take risks. We had a government that had decided that they wanted to switch off the analogue signal, then, in ten years' time. If they were going to switch off the analogue signal, they had to give people an incentive to go digital. Therefore, when DTT was introduced in this country we were given extra spectrum and extra money to do digital programming. I think it depends what governments want from a digital society. The British government decided they wanted everybody to have digital television, which I think is probably right. Not everybody does, but I think it's probably right. And from that moment it was easier to persuade them to give additional funding. And when we got our last funding agreement, one of the four criteria we were asked to spend the money on was the digital world and interactivity. What I think is clear is - our experience with digital terrestrial television is very interesting. You know, the market failed, the market didn't provide. The BBC picked it up, by spending comparatively little money, we've made it work and work successfully, because - we had a hunch and then we did the research which demonstrated that actually there were an awful lot of people who wanted digital television but didn't want pay television. It was as simple as that, and therefore we now market all this stuff today. If you want all the 8 BBC channels, you can go out and spend 40 pound on a box, plug it in and away you go. How you persuade your government to do it? Well they've got to decide is it worth having a fully digital society? The government in this country decided it was. The opposition parties decided it was. It's not been a political battle at all. Then you say: how is it funded? Well, the most expensive thing, as you know, is funding distribution. Distribution costs have gone up by 50 million pounds a year over four years. So - they'll come down again when we switch off the analogue signal, but - that's the expensive part of digital. One is the money for the channels, but also, don't forget the money for distribution.
But I think it's - you know, I'm a broadcaster not a politician. It's for government to make those decisions.
Further Questions from the Floor
(Paul Norris, New ZealandBroadcastingSchool): I've got a question about the political environment. How damaging to the BBC will it be if the Tories get into power with their plans to slice a piece off the licence fee to create a contestable fund for other broadcasters and to restrict the scope of the BBC's activities from what they are now and from what you've talked about tonight?
GD: Well, interestingly, the shadow Secretary of State who made all those statements never said they were his opinion as opposed to policy. He just got moved, so he's no longer the shadow Secretary of State. We don't know what this Conservative party - you know, we reinvent the Conservative party every couple of years here so, we're not too sure what the new Conservative party will think about broadcasting. Clearly it's - they're likely to be more hostile than the current government, but over time there's been a consensus in this country about the BBC. And I'm not sure that will change radically. The difficulty, as I said in my speech, the problem we all face now is that actually the commercial sector has had a rough time. And when commercial sectors have a rough time, they try to blame someone else. Hopefully, advertising revenue will pick up again, fragmentation will slow down a bit, they won't have a rough time and life will be easier. I don't' believe, but that's what I'd like.
(Paul Norris): But how would you feel about a contestable fund, funded in part from your current licence fee, which is available to other broadcasters, including commercial broadcasters?
GD: Well, the suggestion is that 20 per cent of the licence fee should go. The effect on the BBC of that is pretty dramatic. I think the experience around the world of pots of money set aside to be doled out by civil servants to broadcasters is a bit frightening. We had it here with the lottery film fund that I think managed to spend a considerable amount of money without making one successful film. I think also that system would have all sorts of problems with the European Commission 'cause they don't like if you're funded by both. I think the other likely effect of it - the work that has been done on it independently of us suggests that the result would be that there would be less public broadcasting altogether. Because every commercial channel will immediately stop making anything that it needs - and say 'well I'll make this if I can get it from the fund'. When I was involved in the commercial world a bit in Australia and used to watch the way people tried to get money from the Australian equivalent of the content fund - let's just say, I saw more fiddles than I've ever seen in any other part of my life, I think, of how you claimed Australian content.
(Ruth Zanker, New ZealandBroadcastingSchool): I have a really simple and naïve question. We live in a world where every category's breaking down, between education, broadcasting, between high culture, low culture, whatever. I'd like to ask of you in the centre of the civilised world, in terms of BBC education, the Reithian, the educational, what you see as the role in terms of broadcasting digital and education. What sort of initiatives are you making in those realms? How are you bringing them together?
GD: We're going two ways. We're going, one, in terms of the classroom, we're just about - we're spending now 30 million pounds a year over the next five years to create what we call a digital curriculum. We're digitalising the whole of the DCSE syllabus in this country, and the BBC's doing that, with the help of others, but we're leading it. But also, we're trying to put education into the mainstream programming. I mean, for instance: you presumably had Blue Planet a couple of years ago in New Zealand. Now Blue Planet was a quite remarkable piece of television. But in Britain, if you pushed the interactive button on digital television, it took you into a much deeper understanding of Blue Planet. And if you followed it all the way through you could end up getting an educational qualification in marine biology.
(Ruth Zanker: how did that happen?)
GD: It was initiated by HullUniversity. But you said, ok, so you're intrerested in Blue Planet, here's some more. If you're still interested, here's some more, here's some more. And I think about 600 people ending up getting this qualification in marine biology. And that's what we're trying to do with a lot of our factual programming, we put an educational base behind it available online and on interactive television. But then we do things like - we've got a thing coming to an end quite soon called The Big Read where the viewers and listeners in Britain are choosing their favourite book. We're down to I think the 20 favourite books of the last - now the effect of this on the sales of these books and the amount of borrowing of then from libraries is phenomenal. And we just believe that education shouldn't be a small subsection of what we're about but actually we can offer an educational opportunity through an awful lot of what we do.
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