The Best Strategy Is Leading And Not Looking Back

Michael Hedges March 10, 2014 Follow on Twitter

Strategies in the digital age are complex. Audiences always want more, not less. And they always want something new, different and, for Generation Selfie, just for them. Austerity economics often provides the itch for change but taking the long view is powerful.

A public broadcaster voluntarily shrinking its footprint is rare, particularly among the more well-heeled. And so when BBC Director General Tony Hall announced last week that BBC3, one of the broadcaster’s terrestrial television channels, would close there was an audible gasp. Competitors and other detractors have warbled for years about shrinking the BBC and now, perhaps, they’ll be satiated.

Lord Hall set the stage at the Oxford Media Convention in February saying “tough choices” were on the immediate horizon. Last week he clarified. Young adult channel BBC3 would become an online-only channel with more than half its production budget shifted to main TV channel BBC1. If approved by the BBC Trust, Freeview and satellite transmission will end in the fall of 2015. There will be a public consultation prior to any final decision. The BBC Trust has tasked Lord Hall with finding GBP 100 million in savings.

“This is the first time in the BBC’s history that we are proposing to close a television channel,” wrote Lord Hall in a lengthy email to staff (March 5). “I can’t rule out it being the last change to our programs or services. I am certain that this decision is strategically right, but it’s also financially necessary too. Delivering the savings program following the last license fee negotiation means these changes are happening earlier than they might in a better financial environment.”

BBC3 launched in 2003 and is credited for offering edgy comedies like Little Britain, which migrated to BBC1, and Bad Education, a major iPlayer hit. It shares broadcast spectrum with BBC children’s channel CBBC, which will gain an extra broadcast hour each day, the rest going to a proposed BBC1 catch-up channel. BBC3 targets 16 to 34 year olds, coveted by commercial broadcasters and media buyers.

Moving BBC3 to online distribution could be strategic genius. The media habits of young adults, conventional wisdom holds, are firmly in the online and mobile sphere. BBC television director Danny Cohen, in a companion email, wrote that he’d have preferred migrating BBC3 online in “about four or five years’ time…That would be a safer, less risky strategy. But we don’t have the choice to wait.”

“BBC Three will continue to do all the things we love but it will also have the freedom to break traditional shackles and allow the BBC to be a leader in digital change,” Cohen explained. “It will not just be a TV channel distributed online. There is a wonderful creative opportunity here to develop new formats with new program lengths and to reach young audiences in an ever growing number of ways. Will we still want to make all of our current affairs documentaries at 60 minutes in the age of Vice and YouTube? Will we find that contemporary documentary and formats work much better at 40 or 45 minutes than 58? What will we learn about the length we want to make each episode of our dramas or comedies, perhaps learning from new market players like Netflix and Amazon?”

“We’ll need to challenge ourselves to think and create differently,” wrote Cohen, the youngest ever BBC TV director and once BBC3 controller. “In this sense, BBC3 will be the spearhead for a new age of digital change for the BBC. It will be the pathfinder as we learn how audience behavior is changing in the coming years – and it will allow the BBC to be ready for the next waves of disruptive digital disruption.”

The BBC being the BBC, other public broadcasters pay attention to each and every murmur from new Broadcasting House. German public television broadcasters continue to lobby strenuously for a national young adult channel. The BBC situation is “not comparable,” said public network ZDF director Thomas Bellut after a meeting of the ZDF supervisory board, quoted by Hamburger Abendblatt (March 8). German public TV networks ARD and ZDF have asked for about €40 million to ramp up a joint young adult channel. The aggregate budget surplus for German public broadcasting is about €1 billion, truly “not comparable.”

A BBC director general in the recent past tried to axe two well-regarded digital radio channels in the spirit of cost-saving. The clamor attendant proved too much for the BBC Trust, which reversed the decision. Perhaps that was the plan all along.

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