International Journal of Digital Television - Volume 6, Issue 2, 2015

In recent years, various regulators and advisory bodies have advocated for distributed public service models or at least explored its validity. This article aims to analyse the arguments for stepping away from centralized to distributed PSM systems. It questions whether proposals for distributed offers envisage distributed PSM as a complement or as a replacement of existing PSM organizations, whether motives are based on market failure or public interest objectives, how these underlying motives are transposed into specific policy plans and finally, to what extent they fit within a longer term strengthening of national media ecosystems or mainly serve to realize budget cuts and meet specific demands of private competitors. Findings are based on a literature study and an analysis of Flanders, United Kingdom, New Zealand and the Netherlands, in which debates on distributed PSM are recent or ongoing. The article argues that the efficiency and contestable funding arguments that underpin the advocacy for distributed public service are based on ideological market failure beliefs, similar to the ideological choice for centralized public service media. Debates on distributed models often go hand in hand with a desire to limit public service provision, or, a pragmatic stance of politicians seeking to please more than one player in the media market. An ecosystem logic that truly matches market with public interest objectives might therefore deserve a more fundamental exploration.

Since the 1980s a combination of political and technological change has challenged the assumption that only public service broadcasters can provide public service broadcast content. This article examines a particular set of responses to this challenge: schemes created to fund public service content production available to both private and public service broadcasters through competitive tenders. This article considers how the working definitions of public service content developed for these schemes work to concretize a hitherto elusive concept. It suggests that the definitions may not always reflect ‘common-sense’ understandings of public service content, highlighting the problematic nature of the idea of public service content when considered in isolation from public service institutions. It also suggests that scheme definitions may be shaped by contingent external pressures to legitimate public funding of broadcast content and to respond to pressures to ‘marketize’ the provision of that public content.

Openly accessible data sets (open data) have been recognized as valuable assets for creating business opportunities, revitalizing innovation and transparentizing organizational conducts. Public Service Broadcasters (PSB) such as the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) have been motivated to experiment with open data and new forms of innovation in content making, delivery and audience engagement. Through a case study of the BBC Backstage project, this article examines how such open innovation processes of engaging the public in the reuse and remix of open data were conceived, supported, managed and maintained. The research found that BBC Backstage had played an important role in encouraging and motivating people to reuse and repurpose the open data released by the BBC. New forms of outputs have emerged, as seen in the Data Arts visualization project and the R&DTV clips mashups. The article argues that PSB public value can be co-produced through opening up data sets, encouraging reuse and remix, and building up a network of enthusiastic and capable active audiences, the techno-elites, whose status has been encouraged the open data culture and alike. Lessons learned can help understand the meanings of open data from the PSB perspective, and the implications in media industry thereby foster innovation in future media and creative industries.

Local television has existed in one form or another for several decades in the United Kingdom with the first licences awarded in 1972 and subsequent waves of licensing over cable and later broadband networks throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In 2011, as the digital switchover drew to a close, the incoming coalition government launched a new framework to establish the United Kingdom’s first digital terrestrial network of local public service broadcasters. Building on decades of campaigning by pro-local media providers, but triggered by a withdrawal from local news and programming by the recently consolidated ITV plc, the then Secretary of State Jeremy Hunt M. P. argued erroneously that local TV markets in the United States were flourishing. At time of writing, 34 licences have been awarded (and the Birmingham licence re-awarded when the first licensee collapsed before launch); seventeen services have begun broadcasting; and several have failed to launch within the regulator’s two-year deadline. This article provides a brief history of local television in the United Kingdom, and describes the current policy, licensing process and early developments within the fledgling industry. It then presents an ethnographic case study of an emergent local TV service in the north of England, including interviews with practitioners, observations and analysis of broadcast content and schedules. The study argues that local TV has the potential to serve as a powerful engine of capital transformation, developing local stocks of economic, social, cultural and political capital, but that this potential is severely limited by inadequate funding regimes and heightened vulnerability to bias.

This article discusses New Zealand’s Indigenous media organization, Māori Television, and its relationship to a wider history of public service television provision. Māori Television’s emergence is the result of many years of political struggle by Māori to have the New Zealand government recognize its obligations to the revitalization of Māori language and culture as guaranteed by the 1840 Tiriti o Waitangi/Treaty of Waitangi. Māori Television emerged in 2004, with a second channel Te Reo launched on a digital platform in 2008. While charged with the task of helping to revitalize Indigenous language and culture, Māori Television’s original legislation also required that it appeal to a broad audience. Ten years on, many politicians now regard Māori Television as the de facto public broadcaster in a country where commercial imperatives dominate the media ecology. This article examines the implications of understanding Māori Television within a public service television framework in an era of ‘digital plenty’.

The values that gave rise to the ethos of public service broadcasting (PSB) almost a century ago, and which have provided the rationale for PSBs around the world across that time, are under question. This article argues that the process of reinvention of PSBs is enhanced through repositioning the innovation rationale for public service media (PSM). It is organized around a differentiation which is part of the standard repertoire of innovation studies – that between product, process and organizational innovation – as they are being practised by the two Australian PSBs, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS). The article then considers the general problematics of innovation for PSBs through an analysis of the operations of the public value test in the context of European PSM, and its, to this stage, non-application in Australia. The innovation rationale is argued to be a distinctive via media between complementary and comprehensive roles for PSM, which in turn suggests an international, policy-relevant research agenda focusing on international circumstances in which the public broadcaster is not market dominant.

A vigorous debate about the redefinition and expansion of Public Service Broadcasting (PSB) in the new media environment has taken centre stage in global policy fora in the last two decades. It is now crucial to develop new conceptualizations of PSB and analyse how the public service philosophy is being adjusted to the new online and multi-platform environment. Born and Prosser identified the principles of citizenship, universality and quality as the normative criteria behind PSB in a broadcasting environment. This construction offers a valid starting point for the development of a new normative framework for PSB online that I have called PSB 2.0. By drawing on documentary and policy analysis of different European case studies (United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, Denmark and France) this article aims to establish a new framework of PSB that can be applied to the online world. Thus, the study identifies the principles of citizenship, universality, quality and trust as the pillars of PSB 2.0.

The Palgrave Handbook of European Media Policy, Karen Donders, Caroline Pauwels and Jan Loisen (eds) (2014) Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 576 pp., ISBN: 9781137032171, h/bk, £135

The New World of Transitioned Media: Digital Realignment and Industry Transformation, Gali Einav (ed.) (2015) Cham: Springer, 151 pp., ISBN: 9783319090085, h/bk, $129

Political Communication in the Era of New Technologies, Boguslawa Dobek-Ostrowka and Jan Garlicki (eds) (2013) Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 285 pp., ISBN: 98736316441191, h/bk, £41