Globalisation

Behind many of the developments causing such profound change in our society – whether in industries like broadcasting or in whole communities like Manchester – is the influence of globalisation.

For the BBC, globalisation means making new efforts to ensure that our programmes can continue to attract audiences in the face of well-funded international content and an ever-widening choice on the internet.

While national approaches will, I hope, always loom large in broadcasting, best-in-class international content will increasingly – as in other industries – set quality expectations that extend across borders.

Many leading UK programmes now take their benchmarks for quality and innovation as much from the best international output as from rival domestic programmes.

As anyone who’s watched Heroes or one of a dozen other American shows will know, the complacent view once common in Britain – that America may be able to do the explosions and the glamour, but can never match the quality of our writing – is now no longer so obvious.

In our case the impact of globalisation is exacerbated by convergence. The very name AOL Time Warner indicates how barriers between television, cinema, print and online have broken down.

Producing best-in-class output will increasingly require taking risks that earn global rewards.

Even at the BBC, we now often find ourselves of minimum scale to make content that rivals the world’s best – dwarfed as we now are by the giants of global entertainment.

Making a landmark natural history series like Planet Earth for the UK alone has been uneconomic for nearly 30 years. While many programme areas have yet to reach this point, there are powerful reasons to suggest that many soon will.

The growth of new media, and in particular the internet, adds a new and similarly global influence on the BBC’s output.

Among the many effects of more global and more digital media is that the spur to quality and innovation is now – as it is in almost every industry – drawn from far broader terrain.

Ofcom, in its current review of PSB, is rightly concerned that the spur to quality and innovation be maintained.

In the old era of limited choice, of course, a principal spur to innovation and quality among UK broadcasters was the output of other UK broadcasters we all kept each other honest. While elements of this influence, if weaker, will remain, the spur to innovation and quality today is increasingly cross-platform and cross-border.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14