17th March 2008
On March 13th Channel 4 revealed their thinking after a nine-month examination of their public service purposes and a massive survey of the audience. The Next on 4 plans explore the extent to which Channel 4 should provide an alternative public service vision to the BBC, and how that can be funded as their advertising revenues fall over the next few years. The Chanel 4 Board come down strongly against privatisation and simply competing in the commercial market.
In the short term they have proposed two pilot plans to explore what becoming a multi-platform public service alternative will be about. The one that got most of the press attention is the launch of a £50m fund for new media initiatives with an alternative public service purpose. But quietly alongside this C4 announced the craetyion of an annual £10m fund to commission new content – including TV programmes – for an audience they don’t currently actively serve, the 10 – 15 age group.
So Channel 4 are getting into kids, and while £10m won’t save the kids’ TV industry, it’s a valuable addition, especially when targeted at such an under-served audience. These are the young people Phil Redmond thinks the now defunct Grange Hill should have been aimed at. It’s the audience the BBC is abandoning as content gets younger, less challenging, and less relevant to the lives of older kids.
Save Kids’ TV has cautiously welcomed the Channel 4 initiative. It’s a pilot aimed at proving that it’s possible to serve this audience – and then C4 will seek out additional public funding to continue the service into their “lean years” as part of their public service commitment. That funding is by no means assured, as commentators at the Next on 4 launch event pointed out – many of them from the political arena. They argued that just because the Government will no longer need to “gift” the £100 – 150m per year which is the notional cost of the spectrum Channel 4 uses for free, there is no reason to suppose there will be an appetite to fork out these sort of sums in real money to keep public service programming alive on C4.
But we can expect the future funding of Channel 4 to feature heavily in the Ofcom Public Service recommendations, and C4 have positioned themselves to take advantage of anything which emerges from the Review.
Of course the other way to raise the money is to “top-slice” the BBC Licence Fee. Save Kids’ TV does not support this as we see no purpose in simply spreading the funding jam more thinly.
C4’s commitment to 10+ doesn’t cater for the entire children’s audience and solutions still need to be found to the crisis in kids’ TV. SKTV has proposed a comprehensive dedicated children’s service, with its own public funding which goes much further than the C4 initiative announced on March 13th.
Anna Home’s comments to the press after the Next on 4 launch were:
“Save Kids’ TV welcomes Channel 4’s pilot initiative and is pleased that a substantial sum is being proposed, however, there still remains a considerable gap in the funding of the UK kids’ industry. We are happy to see potential multi-genre provision for the 10-15’s and we also welcome a share of Channel 4’s multi-media funds being targeted at this under-served age group. However, in the medium to long term we believe that there is a need for a comprehensive new PSB service for children of all ages, as proposed by Save Kids’ TV in its submission to Ofcom. Today’s announcement is a step in right direction.”
