Ofcom Tells ITV it Only Needs to Bother With 4 Hours of Local News a Week

We’ve been following the progress of the big broadcasting story of the year, namely what’s going to happen to Channel 4 in its time of financial woe? Will it get merged with Five? Or BBC Worldwide? Or will it get some licence fee? And what’s going to happen to ITV? We’ve been waiting for ages for Ofcom, the regulatory body of the industry, to say something about the channel, whose public service broadcasting remit means that it won’t just get sent to the knackers yard like unwatched cable channels. Well, the report from Ofcom has dropped and the revelations are…not very much we didn’t know before. At least to begin with.

They join RTL CEO Gerhard Zeiler this week in spouting tedious platitudes about how great British broadcasting is and how a merger would be, like, a pretty big deal. Ofcom reject top-slicing of the licence fee, i.e. giving some of the Beeb’s money to 4, which everyone was opposed to in all areas of the industry, so my heartrate isn’t exactly racing yet. They say that instead it should form a “second organisation alongside the BBC, with a sustainable economic model and with a strong public service role embedded at its core”, but they didn’t say who else would be in that model. And they proffer up such visionary insights as “While Channel 4 has played an important role and is valued by audiences, its current funding model is unlikely to be sustainable in the future”. Boring! But after 71 long pages, it gets a bit juicier.

The Guardian picks up on the fact that money from the digital switchover could go to 4 instead of some licence fee, but there’s some even more surprising stuff: after strengthening public service broadcasting (PSB) on this new merged channel, they say that ITV and Five could provide less PSB output. Rewind to last year, when ITV submitted a list of demands to Ofcom, and said that if the regulatory structure of their PSB output wasn’t changed as per the demands, they’d drop the PSB and become a fully commercial broadcaster. What they wanted included things like partnerships with the Beeb to provide news, “relaxation of all the regulatory obligations on Channel 3 with the exception of national, international and regional news provision”, “current affairs quota to 20 hours or less per year, out-of-London quota to no more than 10%, independent quota to the minimum European level of 10% and originated production quota reduced to a level no greater than that of the Channel 5 licence”. Or rather, “We can’t be arsed with it anymore.”

Thanks to the pressures of a much diminished TV advertising market, and the fact that their advertising model hasn’t adapted to broadband Britain yet, Ofcom sympathises with ITV having to make expensive PSB output. So they’re letting them get even more commercial and allowing them to drop some of their PSB output – namely regional news programming, which is dropping to just 4 hours a week. In addition 35% of their PSB content must come from outside of London, and they only need to run 50 minutes of current affairs programming a week. I’m sure they’ll find a way to count TV Burp as current affairs as well.

But wait. If Five and ITV don’t have to make regional news any more, and that which they do make may be partly funded by the BBC, does that mean BBC’s pretty-great-sounding BBC Local service is now in the clear? It was previously nixed by Ofcom for being too much of a threat to its competitors’ profits. Now, however, that might not be so much of a problem. In the report, Ofcom address the problem of local output getting ignored, mooting the possibility of a “Channel 6″ that would show local news and output all over the country, potentially with funding topped up by local authorities or central government.

Can’t think of anything more tedious than wall-to-wall local news coverage to be honest. Me and a friend were exchanging our favourite terrible local news headlines recently – she came up with ‘HOMELESS MAN STEALS APPLE’ in the Solihull News, while I offered ‘MAN PHOTOCOPIED’ BOY’S FACE’ in the Sheffield Star. I’m not at all surprised that ITV just wants to hang out in London making David Jason dramas.

Posted by Ben Beaumont-Thomas in Creative Economy | January 21, 2009 4:49PM |