Competitor: BBC Wrong to Reduce Web Operations

Although she competes with the British Broadcasting Corporation’s online operations, Guardian Unlimited editor-in-chief Emily Bell writes that in 10 years’ time “it is a safe bet” that Britons will spend as much if not more time watching the BBC online than they do watching it on TV. “Although it pains me to say it, the BBC is wrong to retreat from the Web. It should repurpose expenditure within online rather than spending it on creaky bits of interactive television or an extra spangly leotard for [the TV show] Strictly Come Dancing.”

The BBC last week agreed to close down some of its websites and outsource 25 percent of its online production, in the wake of a government commission concluding last summer that too much of the BBC’s £111 million annual online budget is spent on services that happen to compete with commercial online publishers.

“The fact that the BBC has not yet mounted a spirited defense of the Web is indicative of the profound difficulty it is having defining its future in a world where ‘broadcasting’ is an increasingly quaint concept. The fact that the BBC has parented an enormous, globally rampaging e-paper frightens many of its management because it takes the organization into bits of territory it never imagined it would enter,” Bell writes in an opinion piece today.

“This is perhaps where the corporation has the biggest philosophical divide to cross. It has grown its website without ever making a case for it, and so it sits far outside the broadcasting B of the BBC. … It is entirely possible that its audience will value the website more highly than it does the more traditional audio-visual parts of the corporation. So the idea that the website is there to support programming could gradually become inverted.

“It must be a trifle shaming that the BBC’s total Web budget is analogous to that of BBC3, despite having a bigger audience and more fans.” Bell adds, “It also spends at least some money servicing a vast American audience — its extensive election coverage was oriented as much at the U.S. as it was at the U.K. This aspect of its business goes almost totally unquestioned, although it is entirely subsidized by the U.K. license fee payers.”