MGEITF 2005: Lord Birt Leaves Questions Unanswered In Edinburgh

The annual MacTaggart lecture at Edinburgh’s International TV Festival is typically a time for agenda setting, controversy and more than a little excitement. But the overwhelming feeling amongst attendees to this year’s offering by Lord Birt was of abject dismay and disappointment.

The main reason was the build-up, with many media commentators expecting Birt to let fly with a stream of reasons why top-slicing the licence fee is the next best thing to top-sliced bread.

But the barrage of Government-endorsed PSB proposals from the Prime Minister’s special adviser never came. Instead, Edinburgh’s McEwan Hall received a careful, considered appraisal of to the TV industry, with Birt driving his commitment to public service broadcasting, but appearing to have forgotten the map of how to get there.

The following morning’s question and answer session failed to shed more light on Birt’s beliefs, as the former BBC director general repeatedly side-stepped questions over licence fee redistribution and the future funding of PSB.

Birt’s questioner, Steve Hewlett, was left visibly annoyed at his guest’s reluctance to flesh out his argument, repeatedly approaching the question from various angles, but ultimately to no avail.

Birt’s appearance at the Festival did throw up some interesting topics for debate, however. His address detailed the increasing role of technology in the home, with Birt predicting a centralised wireless hub linking consumers’ media, communication, computing and household security systems.

Lord Birt stated that the increased consolidation within the technology sector would see telecoms and cable operators doing battle with broadcasters such as Sky for control of subscriptions to such unified services.

The topic of unified technologies and a new type of service provider, offering voice, internet and video to consumers was one that repeatedly cropped up at Edinburgh, from Mark Thompson’s assertion that this will be the “decade of video on demand” (see Thompson Announces On Demand Programming From BBC), to Andy Duncan’s pledge to drive Channel 4 towards mobile media (see Channel 4 Boss Makes The Case For Public Funding).

Edinburgh International TV Festival: www.mgeitf.co.uk