License fee latest

I've been a bit remiss in keeping up with BBC news lately, but here's a quick update on the BBC's attempts to secure a license fee increase.

• "MPs find fee rise hard to swallow" and "In danger of a backlash": Although it looks like the BBC will finally get its license fee increase - seven years of annual inflation increases plus 2.3%, "to £150.50 per annum by 2013" - but the size of the increase has raised hackles among MPs and industry types. Although "this is to allow the BBC to fulfil the vision laid out for it in the government's green paper on the organisation's future - as a leading force in the much-vaunted switch to digital" it still rubs some people up the wrong way.
  
• "BBC goes to the City for digital cash": Although the BBC got its licence fee okayed, they're still looking for more cash - by going into the "money markets to raise a substantial bond in order to pay for the additional costs of digital switchover, targeting help for vulnerable, older and disabled people." These over-75's will need BBC help in making the transition by the 2012 deadline, and the beeb needs to find the cash to do it.
  

It's not just Rup investing in the internet ...

While News Corporation boss Rupert Murdoch has been prominently investing in internet media firms (as reported in London Calling), he's certainly not the only one. Other big media corporations, including Viacom and Time Warner, are also pursuing aggresive interent acquisition strategies. The Benton Comm Policy listserv notes a Wall Street Journal piece (Story here but requires registration) that highlights how these and other TNCs "are spending billions in a spate of acquisitions and aggressive Internet initiatives, and are likely to keep on spending." Why are they doing this? In a nutshell, it's the fear of being left behind by new media as audiences migrate to the internet--potentially prompting advertisers to jump ship. The WSJ piece goes on:

Some hope to directly challenge the giant portals like Yahoo Inc. and Google Inc. -- Web sites that serve as gateways to the Internet. Others are transferring some of their most valuable content to online sites, even though that risks alienating their traditional distribution partners. Although it's too soon to say whether the media industry's latest approach will bear fruit, the companies are finding some areas more fertile than others. They have been investing heavily in youth-oriented Web sites, like gaming, and less in areas like prime-time entertainment programming that is still a cash cow for the television networks. They're also mostly avoiding the pay-per-view model, which hasn't yet gained traction online.

Robert Fisk barred from entering US

The Independent's veteran Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk, a constant and vociferous critic of the US-UK invasion of Iraq has apprently been barred from entering the United States. Doug Ireland of Direland cites a (Santa Fe) New Mexican report that "U.S. immigration officials refused Tuesday [Sept. 20] to allow Robert Fisk . . . to board a plane from Toronto to Denver. Fisk was on his way to Santa Fe for a sold-out appearance in the Lannan Foundation 's readings-and-conversations series Wednesday night." A program officer for the Lannan Foundation was quoted as saying "Fisk was told that his papers were not in order." Fisk ended up being interveiwed via satellite link from a Toronto TV station by Amy Goodman, host of Pacifica Radio's Democracy Now! (MP3 of interview is available at the Democracy Now! web site)

BBC's Internet TV trial ready to go

The Wall Street Journal is taking notice of the BBC's moves to mainstream the Internet and integrate it with its broadcast activities. Aaron Patrick of the WSJ points out the Beeb's trial, beginning later this month, to issue its iMP (interactive media player) to about 5,000 selected UK viewers to allow them to download and watch most of the BBC's television content for up to seven days. (This is apparently the same program as the MyBBC player Doctor Media previously referred to in blog entries here and here.) "No other broadcaster has made so many shows available for download to computers," notes Patrick. He goes on: "The BBC hopes its iMP software will become the iTunes of Internet television, allowing viewers to customize their TV schedules over the course of a week."

Amazingly, the iMP uses peer-to-peer file-sharing/networking software similar to that designed for Napster and Kazaa (software that triggered a "music-sharing free-for-all" on the Internet). In this form of peer-to-peer networking,

iMP users will be required to share the downloads with each other. As programs spread from computer to computer, most iMP users will actually download them from other people instead of the BBC. That means the broadcaster won't have to buy Internet capacity to transmit large computer files to millions of people.

The BBC's move shows how far ahead it has moved from U.S. broadcasters in this regard. U.S. networks, fearful of what they've seen happen with musical downloads, have so far only toyed with internet television, and refused to make complete shows available for download (although of course countless TV shows are in any case illegally obtained off the Internet thanks to software such as BitTorrent). The BBC is trying to make the whole process legal and above board. Patrick quotes Nancy Cassutt, vice president of content at Internet Broadcasting Systems Inc.: "What the BBC is doing is what every network Web site here in America is trying to do -- discover what works online." It helps of course that the BBC doesn't have to worry about shareholders and making profits as it tries out this bold new experiment.

The trial should last for three months, and if it's successful (and why wouldn't it be!), Auntie "plans to make the iMP freely available in the U.K. next year, becoming the first TV network to show its entire schedule over the Internet."

But remember, you'll have to live in the UK to get this.

News Corp hedging its political bets in US?

Tina Brown, writing in the Washington Post, notes something that most Americans might find incredible: that Rupert Murdoch could switch his allegiance to the Democrats if he felt it was in his business interests to do so. In a piece titled "Rupert Murdoch, Bending With the Wind," Brown notes Bush's sinking poll numbers and the unexpectedly strong performance by "liberal" CNN in its coverage of Hurricane Katrina. She also notes "Recent friendly meetings between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Murdoch, recorded in the New York Observer" that just could "be early signs of embryonic bet-hedging" by the media veteran. Really? How far can we take this? Can we really countenance tthe possibility that, come the next Presidential election, Murdoch's empire might turn from the Republicans and toward a Democrat--even Hillary?

To address that question, Brown tries to illuminate something about the basic instincts of the man who has proved to be perhaps the globe's greatest buccaneer and survivor. She points out: "Less publicized than Murdoch's fierce political conservatism--undoubtedly his private conviction--is his readiness to turn on a dime when it's commercially expedient. That suppleness is one of the things that make him such a formidable opponent. Nothing distracts him from his business goals--not ideology, not friendship, not some inconvenient promise, not even family."

Need a historical exemplar? Brown reminds American readers of Murdoch's volte-face in 1997, when he shifted his media empire's support from John Major's hapless conservative government to "New" Labour's up-and-coming Tony Blair. Could he be planning a similar shift in the US--taking a leaf out of his UK playbook? Perhaps.

No one in London believed that the Sun, Murdoch's rabidly Thatcherite tab, would ever support the Labor Party. But in the 1997 election Rupert was quick to spot Tony Blair's rising star. The tabloid cowboy editor, Piers Morgan, kept a diary of working for Murdoch while editing his scandal sheet the News of the World and wrote a book that rode the bestseller list all summer in Britain. "The Tories look like dying donkeys," he notes in a diary entry in August 1995, "and Blair is starting to resonate with the public as a fresh, dynamic, viable alternative. Murdoch doesn't back losers and he is talking in a way that suggests he might ditch the Tories."

Brown goes on to cite the comparisons frequently made between Murdoch and William Randolph Hearst, which she characterizes as often "misleading." Why?

Like Hearst, Murdoch was a liberal populist as a young man and moved far to the right in middle age. But Hearst, once he switched, kept his flag flying from the same ideological pole. When the vehemently anti-communist Rupert wanted to expand his television beachhead in Asia, he didn't hesitate to cancel a book contract by his HarperCollins imprint with the former governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten, rather than risk alienating the Chinese. Bruce Page, author of "The Murdoch Archipelago," described to me Murdoch's outwardly authoritarian character as "fluid nothingness at the core -- less a matter of drives than lack of the containing structure found in normal people."

Add in a possible change-of-heart by Murdoch's right-hand man at Fox News, Roger Ailes, and you have a script that could--just possibly--lead to a shift in direction for Murdoch's empire. Remember, it happened in the UK eight years ago, and it happened overnight. The only question--at least for Brown--is whether the Republicans, like the British Conservatives, have really "started to look like dying elephants." Remember, Rupert doesn't back losers.

Next step on Rupert's Internet assault

Rupert Murdoch has been gathering his forces for the next step of his assault on the Internet. The Guardian's David Teather and Jane Martinson note that up to 45 of Murdoch's chief executives met this weekend near Carmel, California "for two days of private discussions on what he [Murdoch] has described as the company's highest priority: how to grapple with the threat and opportunity of the internet to the media empire he has spent a lifetime building."

As Doctor Media pointed out, Murdoch's News Corporation has, from almost a standing start, begun to build a significant web presence since the beginning of this year. It has formed an internet unit, Fox Interactive Media, that oversees its web activities. And with big-budget purchses of Intermix Media (including MySpace.com, a popular social networking site), IGN Entertainment, and Scout.com (which will be integrated into News Corp's Fox Sports enterprises), NewsCorp has made a spash on the Internet, and Murdoch also apparently wishes to buy Blinkx, a search engine.

The Guardian article reports that these recent purchases now "gives News Corp 70 million unique users and 12bn monthly page views. That catapults it into the fourth-largest internet firm in the world by page impressions, behind Yahoo, Time Warner and MSN, according to the investment bank Merrill Lynch." That's a pretty scary statistic, considering that News Corp hasn't been on most people's Internet radar screens up till now.

Apparently the agenda at the Carmel meeting was dominated by "how to turn News Corp's web properties into a hub for entertainment-related content. One News Corp insider called the strategy an attempt to create an 'entertainment Google' -- a one-stop shop for all those looking for computer games, movies, music or chat online."

The BBC's future: Don't look to Canada?

As Doctor Media noted in her post the other day ("Murdoch in context") about Robert McChesney's talks on the need to save PBS and public broadcasting in the U.S., she's not optimistic about whether the system can actually be saved in any meaningful way. Neither am I, though I agree we need to make an effort. This leads her to raise the alternative psb approach that has begun to be outlined on this blog: based on "the BBC and the potential of a global public sphere or at least some sort of transnational Anglo public service sphere." The BBC clearly is making a valiant effort to retain its broad-based relevance in a changing media world, but if we look elsewhere in transnational Anglo PSB sphere, we might be less happy with what we see.

This brings me to Canada's CBC, or Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Staff at Canada's 70-year-old public broadcaster, supposedly "the voice of the nation," have been on strike for some three weeks now, services have been severely disrupted, and audiences are down 25 percent. But, according to Peter Preston of the Observer, "the damnable thing, the awful lesson from all this, is that nobody much seems to care. Only 10 per cent of Joe Public, once polled, thinks the strike a major inconvenience; only 27 per cent would even describe it as a minor inconvenience. The rest of Canada just walks on by, untroubled, uninvolved."

Preston, making a partial comparison between the public service broadcasters in Britain and Canada, notes the BBC's much stronger position in its home country -- though that should be no reason for complacency.

Of course the BBC doesn't wallow in quite the same unpopularity hole as its Canadian cousin, at least for the moment. CBC prime time TV audiences have dropped to 5 per cent in the past six years (since the last strike). The usual American marauders and digital destroyers have done it terrible damage. But don't pretend that the same forces of future gloom pass Wood Lane by. BBC audience share in August - 21.5 per cent - was its worst monthly figure ever, and the last Sunday of the month - 16.8 per cent - the worst day since records began. Shrinking, shrinking ...

What happens - the Canadian question, already put - when Joe Taxpayer declines to stand up and be counted again? There are differences, to be sure. We have the licence fee, Ottawa has direct government subsidy (nearing a billion dollars a year) to go with CBC's revenue from advertising, a mix-and-match that might come to Britain if fee-payers got too restive. The BBC tries to chase big numbers for its biggest shows; CBC has largely given up the ghost. Yet still, it's the similarities that bring a chill.

Yes, there are similarities, just as there are significant differences. The CBC has also attempted to get on the new media bandwagon, with an extensive CBC.ca web site, RSS feeds, podcasting, a free archives service, and so on (see wikipedia's "Internet" section); still it doesn't appear to be as innovative as the BBC's efforts (see, e.g., "MyBBC" on this blog). But this apparently hasn't stopped CBC's slide. For whatever historical, cultural or economic reasons, there is no doubt that the CBC is now in a much weaker position than the BBC. Yet both corporations were and are supposed to be "voices of the nation." It's one thing to ask whether the BBC can avoid the marginalization that bedevils U.S. public broadcasting, which after all was never really part of the national mainstream. The CBC example raises the question of how the BBC can avoid being relegated from national dominance to marginalization.

Yet the threat of national marginalization might (I stress might, as I'm still thinking this through) be a force driving these old-school public servive broadcasters away from a national psb orientation toward a transnational psb role. Of course, psbs would have to tread a fine line between maintaining public (taxpayer) support at home and spreading out to new audiences abroad. Obviously it makes sense for psbs--especially English-speaking psbs--to work together, although there is nothing wrong with working with for-profit entities, as long as the collaboration produces psb-friendly results. The BBC has clearly grasped this new reality. The CBC, I fear, hasn't.