Losing out to YouTube
With their watersheds and regulatory imposed limitations on nudity, violence and profanity, public service broadcasters must look rather quaint to younger generations, writes Raymond Snoddy
There’s nothing like a set of numbers to dramatically illustrate a trend and crystallise fears. They offer the eloquence of a still photograph, as opposed to the lulling nature of continuous motion.
Everyone who has young children or grandchildren doesn’t need stats to know that viewing habits of the young has changed dramatically and that they now head semi-automatically for the Netflix and YouTube buttons.
But the numbers, and the issues that flow from them, certainly concentrate the mind – particularly when those numbers come from the BBC plan.
And so it was just before Easter that the newspaper headlines read: “Young watch more Netflix than BBC.”
Only a few days earlier Biddy Baxter had won a Broadcasting Press Guild award for her contribution to Blue Peter, an echo from another age when hardly a child in the country was not a viewer to the programme.
According to the BBC, 82 per cent of children go to Google-owned YouTube for their on-demand content, half to Netflix, with only 29 per cent choosing the BBC iPlayer.
You can keep on stirring in the scary numbers until the cows come home. Five years ago 40 per cent of 12-15 year olds watched CBBC, now it is more like 25 per cent. In part the cause is obvious – an explosion of choice from four channels mainly aimed at children in 1998 to 35 channels today, most of them of North American origin.
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The BBC is not rolling over and accepting the inevitable and has promised to spend £34 million more over three years to enhance children’s programmes and produce an app to better reach the 43 per cent of 12-15 year-olds who now view on their mobiles rather than on television sets.
Yet just beneath the surface, and not very far beneath, there lurks the issue of regulation, or more precisely lack of regulation, of what has been called the £10 billion a year onslaught from the US tech companies providing UK relevant content online, most of it designed for the 15 plus or 18 plus market.
The scale of the problem has been well illustrated in interview comments by Claire Enders, founder of the media research group Enders Analysis.
“You have Netflix of which 80 per cent of the choices offered on the front pages are 15 plus rated, YouTube with infinite attractions to children and you have the same phenomenon with Amazon and you don’t have the parental controls that operate on those three major online platforms,” says Enders.
One way to look at the issue, she adds, is that these companies “are carpetbaggers, they don’t pay tax, they don’t have a watershed, they don’t operate under any advertising regulations and they don’t have editorial (such as news or difficult documentaries.)”
The likelihood is that in the scheme of things children are seeking out 18 plus rated online material because it is there and there doesn’t seem to be a lot anyone can do about it [To be fair, Netflix does allow parental controls – Ed.].
On the other side of the coin the dear old public service broadcasters of Europe appear by comparison almost quaint with their regulatory imposed limitations on levels of nudity, violence and profanity, certainly before the nine o’clock watershed, itself a strange concept in an on-demand, online world.
Senior Ofcom executives who are also parents have expressed concern about what their young children can easily get access to with their remote controls.
As with many issues in the digital universe it is a lot easier to describe the condition than come up with a cure.
Top Sky executives have pondered privately on whether the answer is simply to even up the battle with the tech giants by reducing levels of regulation faced by existing broadcasters.
The idea is hardly far-fetched. Years ago Mark Thompson, when he was director-general of the BBC, wondered whether there was now enough choice in news for requirements of impartiality on commercial broadcasters to be relaxed. In return for the privilege of the licence fee the BBC would retain its impartiality obligations. Thompson was speaking before Trump and fake news and may take a different view now.
In fact the total lack of balance from America’s commercial broadcasters and its drastic effects in the Trump presidential campaign would tend to suggest that the abolition of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 was a mistake and it would be an even bigger mistake for the UK to ditch its impartiality rules for all their inevitable problems of definition.
In fact rather than limiting the potential of the UK’s commercial broadcasters, current regulations could be seen as a plus – a mark of trust and decency and an important differentiator from the limitless mass of unregulated material out there.
In current circumstances there surely must come a time when media agencies stop merely talking up the importance of brand safety and progress towards actually doing something about it. Mustn’t there?
Without going to extremes can anything be done about any of this. As a single issue in a single country probably not, although the EU has had more luck so far in getting the attention of the tech giants than the UK on its own – another small downside of Brexit, but that’s another story.
The arguments have to be more broadly based, as indeed are the issues – nothing less than the survival and transmission of culture and the growing arguments that the tech giants are publishers rather than mere platforms and therefore have greater responsibilities than they have been willing to acknowledge so far.
If anything the arguments have got sharper in recent days and go beyond standards of entertainment and into darker places, as reported by the police, of social media being used to stir up violence among the young and becoming part of gang culture.
So should the aim now be to move towards a new comprehensive contract between governments, on behalf of society and the tech companies on how they can become better citizens – a programme that would range from paying fairer taxes and taking down unacceptable content more rapidly, to greater awareness about pumping out unsifted material to children.
We are only in the foothills of finding solutions and all ideas are welcome but the status quo is hardly an option.
Rather like the “and finally” slot that used to end News at Ten not all the numbers are horrendous.
According to Thinkbox, live TV still dominates and Facebook viewing adds up to only 3 minutes per person a day and 88 per cent of YouTube use is by 20 per cent of its users.
So don’t have nightmares.