Beeb's forced march online threatens to silence too many voices

Roy Greenslade
11 Jun 2008

There is never a time when the BBC is out of the news. Take the latest crop of complaints about BBC Worldwide, the public service broadcaster's commercial arm. It is undergoing an Office of Fair Trading (OFT) inquiry into its plan to launch, in company with ITV and Channel 4, an online TV service called Kangaroo.

In a separate move, Time Out magazine's founder, Tony Elliott, is to ask the OFT to look at whether Worldwide's majority holding in the travel guide Lonely Planet breaches the BBC's fair trading policy and competition law.

Also the Government is considering whether to give Channel 4 a stake in Worldwide as a backdoor way of avoiding giving the commercial broadcaster an upfront portion of the licence fee. Though that idea bears the hallmarks of political kite-flying, it has had the effect of thrusting the BBC once more into the limelight.

There is already growing concern from regional newspaper companies about proposals for the BBC to strengthen its local online news service in 60 localities throughout Britain. Those same companies successfully headed off previous BBC plans to launch "ultra-local" TV stations, and are making roughly the same argument this time around by saying there is no point in the BBC replicating services they already provide, especially at a time when their revenues are plunging.

In many ways, the BBC Worldwide stories raise the same questions. What is it proper for the BBC to do, or not do? Should there be boundaries to its enterprise? Is it fair for a public service broadcaster to encroach on commercial territory? Indeed, is it fair for the BBC to have an arm's-length commercial division anyway?

There are ironies, of course. It is difficult to suppress laughter when one reads that Rupert Murdoch's media behemoth, News Corporation, is bellyaching about the BBC using its muscle. Its BSkyB division has lined up with Virgin Media to protest at the Kangaroo initiative by making a formal complaint to the OFT.

The resulting inquiry, which began at the end of April and has a way to run yet, is considered by BBC Worldwide to be so sensitive that it won't be drawn into discussing details of what amounts to a video on-demand service. It will surely want to avoid an OFT referral to the Competition Commission because of concerns that it is anti-competitive.

Unsurprisingly that hasn't stopped BSkyB and Virgin from going public with their views. Nor are those big players alone. Joost, a website currently offering more than 20,000 TV shows for free, feels it is unfair that the main networks have refused to supply it with their programmes and now appear to be on the verge of locking it out entirely. Joost's chief executive, Mike Volpi, says: "This move to create a single distribution channel makes it very difficult for any outside player to compete in the UK market."

On the other hand, why should the BBC give away its content for free to a rival in order that it can make money by selling advertising around it? Then again, should the BBC be providing its own service that will mean it can make money through advertising?

You can see how complex matters become once a public service broadcaster that sincerely believes it is underfunded sets out to redress the balance by moving into the commercial world.

Part of the reason for BBC Worldwide's activities is to pump profits into the BBC pot in order to compensate for the corporation's failure to obtain the licence fee increase it sought from Government. It's a drop in the ocean, given that Worldwide made £111million in its last year of operation, while the total take from the fee is about £3.5 billion.

But Time Out's Elliott is unimpressed with such arguments, claiming that BBC Worldwide is "out of control". Now Elliott is an admirable character, having created a global brand with his magazine. As with Joost's Volpi, however, I wonder whether he protests too much.

The benefit of the Elliott outburst, the Kangaroo inquiry, and even the nonsense about Channel 4 being given a stake in BBC Worldwide - nonsense because C4 requires much more money than Worldwide could ever give it - is that it raises a necessary debate.

With the BBC growing apace, especially with its internet activities, it is important for us to ask about the propriety of a public service broadcaster dominating digital media.

One of the cornerstones of our democracy, though we overlook it too often, is media diversity and plurality. I'm a great supporter of the BBC but I want to ensure that there are vibrant and profitable competitors.

The BBC's logic in investing so heavily in online initiatives is flawless. It is the future. But the point of the net is to allow access to many voices and I fear that too many of them will be silenced if the BBC's apparently limitless ambition is not curbed.