Multiplatforming Public Service Broadcasting: The Specialist Factual Independent Production Ecology in the UK's Digital Television Landscape

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This project investigates the changing production ecology of the UK's independent specialist factual production sector in relationship to the role and future of public service broadcasting (PSB) in the emerging digital television landscape. The digitalization of television, a process of switchover to be completed by 2012, brings with it better sound and visual quality, a growth in the number of channels available and increasingly 'converges' television's production practices, programming forms and audiences with other forms of digital media. From the development of websites associated with particular programs, through to the advent of interactive, mobile and online TV, television might be thought of as a 'multiplatform' experience. Television is no longer simply the 'box in the corner', but experienced and produced across a range of screens, sites and technological platforms. This expansion of channels and platforms brings about increased competition for audiences, who have seen their choices for how, when, where and what kind of television to watch expand dramatically. As a result, traditional broadcasters are experiencing a continuing decline in the number and amount of time audiences spend watching TV. This has called into question the role of PSB as a funding and regulatory model for UK television, with the media regulator, Ofcom, recently suggesting that the future of PSB is at a crossroads.Public service broadcasters are responding to these challenges with new commissioning, technologies and production strategies. Our study focuses on the BBC's and Channel 4's adoption of multiplatform production and commissioning strategies, which seek to exploit content and engage viewers across a range of digital media platforms. Such strategies not only produce new TV forms, but require new production practices. However, these changes and pressures are not only experienced by the broadcasters, but also by the independent television production sector, which increasingly includes digital media companies, which supply programs and content to them. This project seeks to understand the function both independent production companies and these multiplatform practices have in shaping the future of PSB in the digital age. We do this by firstly examining the role that specialist factual independent production companies play in contributing to the shifting characteristics of PSB in the UK. Secondly, we position this role in relation to the way in which the production cultures of this sector respond to and creatively negotiate the move to multiplatform television as part of the wider commercial, regulatory, technological and cultural challenges of the digital age. We examine specialist factual programming as a genre both traditionally associated with notions of PSB, but also recently ranked as one of those most highly valued by participants in Ofcom's first phase of its current PSB review. To do this, rather than simply examine the amount of specialist programming produced or the audience's reaction to it, we seek to unpick the industry's own understanding of this genre's role in contributing to distinctive characteristics of the UK's PSB landscape. By drawing on interviews with, and participant observation of, workers in the independent specialist factual production sector, as well as with commissioners and key players in the broadcasting industries, our research will establish what challenges and opportunities digitalization brings PSB. We then test these 'self-theorizations' by examining the programming practices and content of the independent sector, regulatory documents and discourses circulated within and by the television industry through trade journals, press releases and other trade artifacts. By disseminating this research to industry, regulators, audiences and higher education institutions, this project will therefore make an important contribution to understanding the future role and shape of PSB.