President Trump versus the BBC in a Florida courtroom will doubtless be entertaining viewing. The BBC should win – for a number of solid legal, and not merely patriotic, reasons – and that would be a cause to celebrate.
Some good would have come out of the grisly Panorama edit of Trump’s speech outside the Capitol on 6 January 2021, and the subsequent meltdown that led to the departure of Director General Tim Davie.
But the real fight for the BBC is elsewhere. A government Green Paper, launched today at the beginning of the Charter renewal process, has kicked off the debate about the BBC’s relevance in the age of the American streaming giants (Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+ et al) and social media platforms with vast resources and algorithmic power like TikTok and Instagram. And, above all, YouTube, where millions upon millions of videos and channels are competing against the BBC for your attention.
The BBC is – in revenue terms – a minnow by comparison, with an annual income of about £5.4bn in 2024/25. Netflix alone is forecast to have revenues of $45.2bn (£33.7bn) this year.
So you might think the game is up and that the figures already demonstrate that the BBC, whether you like it or dislike it, is a lost cause. Indeed, countless politicians and hostile competitors talk as if Netflix were already the dominant destination for viewers in the UK, and others – more pertinently – point to the BBC’s struggles with younger audiences.
But the facts do not bear this out, and not by a long chalk. Combined BBC viewing – including on iPlayer – accounts for more time than Netflix and all the other streamers combined. And the BBC says that last year that iPlayer viewing time grew faster than any other streamer, Netflix included.
The BBC leads even amongst those aged between 16 and 34. Weekly reach is just under 70 per cent, and for the under 16s it is about the same. The corporation, although wounded, is far from dead.
These figures are all lower than they were the last time the BBC Charter was renewed in 2017. And it is reasonable to assume that they will slide further. But consumption of the BBC – across all its audiences – is descending from truly astonishing heights, and what’s left is more than enough to justify a universal fee to sustain it.
Of course if there is no political will to support public service broadcasting in the UK (which does not only mean the BBC) then consumption will fall faster because there simply won’t be enough money in the system to produce enough high quality content.
Money matters. The licence fee has been cut in real terms by over 30 per cent since 2010. Politicians, although often able to mouth platitudes about the value of public service broadcasting, have largely declined to lead a useful debate about why the obligation of paying a licence fee is worthwhile, and benefits UK talent and UK democratic life. Perhaps culture secretary Lisa Nandy, who is in charge of the Green Paper, will do better.
There is some work too for the BBC to do. Tim Davie (and his predecessors) knew it. The Beeb has always done worse with younger audiences than with older ones; the same was true when I looked into this 30 years ago. But all of these cohorts of the young turned to the BBC more and more as they grew older. They had had enough contact with BBC output in their frolicking years to have a sense of what was on offer, and they found the content when they wanted it later in life.
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At the very least the BBC needs to have enough brand recognition amongst younger audiences for that phenomenon to be repeated. And that means BBC content – in all its many forms – needs to be more easily discovered on YouTube and elsewhere. That can be helped by regulation that would insist that UK public service broadcasting content is given a degree of prominence – a mild dilution to the divine right of algorithmic sovereignty. But the BBC itself needs to improve the way people can find its content – even on iPlayer. It’s not up to the standards of most of the competition.
The BBC brand itself – despite the endless hyperventilating debate and internal drama – remains very potent. BBC News is still the most trusted big news provider out there. But its independence needs to be better protected now. The recent mess added to a sense that the appointments system to the Board is not good enough. There’s too much politics involved and some of the Board seem unable to find the right way to challenge the executives, proportionally and with real weight.
So there is much for Lisa Nandy to get her teeth into. We all pay for the BBC, we all own it – and it still matters.
Mark Damazer worked for BBC News between 1984 and 2004, and was controller of BBC Radio 4 between 2004 and 2010
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