BBC Three Moves Online While Licence Fee Payers Cut the Cloth

Richard Forbes is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.

The BBC Trust has approved Lord Hall’s plan to cancel BBC Three and move its current service online as a part of a greater move on the part of the BBC to reduce costs. With the BBC Trust’s approval for the decision, the move will now in all likelihood become a reality – a decision also applauded by the Culture, Media and Sport Committee in its report on the ‘Future of the BBC’ earlier this year. BBC1 and BBC2 will be encouraged to take on some kinds of programming that may have previously aired on BBC Three, while a transition period is also expected to run the online content before the BBC Three is taken off the airwaves.

The BBC Trust suggests that there is ‘a clear long-term potential in a new online service,’ arguing that the elusive 16-34 age group is most likely to view content online. Danny Cohen, Director of Television for the BBC has argued that the 16-34 age group, the core target audience for BBC Three, is less likely to view content on a traditional television set. However, the BBC Trust does admit that the move online will cut into the BBC Three’s current viewership – but by how much?

An astonishing 80% of current BBC Three viewers will not watch its content online after this move to digitalize content, according to the Trust’s prediction – which begs to question where the value is in this move with regards to it as a public service for British consumers? BBC Three, an institution in and of itself, provides some 11.2 million viewers a week with ‘innovative’ programmes intended for youth audiences for which it has been the birthplace for many of British television’s stars and hit shows – not to mention a home at one time for Doctor Who Confidential, Torchwood and regular reruns of Doctor Who.

Two independent producers, Jimmy Mulville and Jon Thoday have entered into the debate, offering to buy BBC Three for £100m and pressing John Whittingdale, cultural secretary, to intervene and scrutinise the BBC’s decision to axe BBC Three .

‘They are going to wipe out a £1bn investment and the government really needs to step in,’ says Mulville. ‘This has to be part of a larger conversation in the talk about charter renewal. We’ve got to get John Whittingdale involved, it is too important.’

Thoday adds, ‘It is such a disastrous thing to pull back from programming for young people, diverse audiences and new talent.’ He also argues that moving BBC Three online may have more to do with politics than it does good business sense – rolling back the 24-hour news cycle would save the cash-strapped corporation more and make better sense from a programming perspective as viewers increasingly abandon linear, news channel broadcasts, but would be a harder change to implement as it’d be more ‘politically difficult’, he argues.

As it stands, license fees for the BBC have been frozen at £145.50 and a decline in the number of viewers using television sets in Britain has hit the BBC’s revenue hard: a £150 million loss in revenue which has forced the BBC to announce that it will be cutting 1,000 jobs, alongside its move to push BBC Three online, to help offset the emerging budgetary gap. By moving the BBC Three online, however, the BBC intends to save £30m a year and divert some of that money into the drama budget for BBC1 where programs like Doctor Who may benefit.

Nevertheless, there still remains a looming question with regards to the BBC’s licensing and finances altogether as the corporation is set to negotiate with the government over license fees among other issues with the BBC Charter’s review next year.

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