ITN Challenges BBC Over Licence Fee Bid
TV news broadcaster ITN has raised questions over the validity of the BBC’s claim for more funding under the next licence fee, claiming that the corporation could reduce its news costs to provide more value for money in the long term.
Commenting in advance of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport’s seminar on the BBC licence fee today, ITN claims the Government should examine the BBC’s new media expansion plans, as well as scrutinising its news expenditure.
The Corporation is currently requesting £1.6 billion in extra funds to secure “quality content”. This is in addition to £0.6 billion to deliver “local services,” and £1.2 billion to build a “digital infrastructure”.
However, Mark Wood, chief executive of ITN, says the Corporation is stepping outside its remit, explaining: “The BBC’s new media strategy is once again too expansionist. It shows no sign of curbing its tendency to throw public money into developing new media platforms. This risks swamping markets which are well-served by commercial operators.
“ITN is already providing these services without public funding. ITN’s multimedia business is growing quickly and ITN is now the UK’s leading supplier of news, entertainment and other video content to 3G mobile phones and broadband. There is no evidence of any kind of commercial failure in this market and it is therefore very unclear as to why the BBC should need to allocate so much resource to it.
The news broadcaster also draws attention to the lack of detail in the BBC’s licence fee bid over what levels of expenditure they expect for their news operations.
“We believe that the BBC has plenty of scope for even greater efficiencies in its news expenditure,” Wood continued. “The BBC says it provides ‘good value for money’ but ITN and other commercial news services provide outstanding programming at a fraction of the cost of the BBC’s news provision.
“ITN has driven its costs down dramatically over the last decade by harnessing new technologies and pioneering new techniques in newsgathering. ITN’s unprecedented eight wins at the Royal Television Society 2005 awards for television journalism show that good cost management need not affect quality.”
ITN recently secured an extension to its contract for news programming with Channel 4, guaranteeing production of its award-winning Channel 4 News to the end of 2010. The new contract is worth over £100 million, encompassing news content across Channel 4 and More4. The new agreement also covers new media activities such as online and mobile services (see ITN Scoops £100m Channel 4 News Deal).
BBC: 020 8743 8000 www.bbc.co.uk ITN: 020 7430 4700 www.itn.co.uk