BBC's Plans for Charter Renewal Have Been Released

29th June 2004

The BBC have released a 136 page document laying out their plans for the BBC in their bid to ensure the Royal Charter is renewed in 2006.

Get ready for lots of adverts telling us that "It's Your BBC" over the next 2 years. I'm afraid that phrase leaves a rather bitter taste in the mouth given that the BBC have unapologetically degraded the audio quality of their stations on DAB from high to low audio quality and that they may never be able to increase the bit rates back to their 2001-levels if Ofcom don't allow them to get any more national DAB capacity.

However, I do support keeping the licence-fee, because I believe that commercialising the BBC would be very detrimental to the quality of programming that the BBC provide, and despite the fact that they've drastically degraded the audio quality of their stations on DAB I certainly trust them to maintain higher audio quality on the other digital platforms.

You just have to look at commercial TV and radio to see what the BBC would end up like if it was commercialised. Just taking radio as an example, Radio 1 would almost certainly lose a great deal of its specialist shows, Radio 3 would become more like Classic FM, and I can't really envisage a commercial Radio 4 at all.

Ultimately, the alternative to a licence-fee funded BBC is just far too unpalatable to bear thinking about.

One thing I'd definitely like to see is more emphasis on the technical quality of the BBC's broadcasts. The BBC seems to place little importance on the broadcast quality of their transmissions these days, and there isn't anybody with engineering knowledge on the BBC's Executive Committee, which I believe never used to be the case, and it's about time that broadcast quality was less dependent on the views of accountants, and more dependent on the views of the engineers that actually have technical knowledge. This situation is nicely summed up by the fact that the person in charge of transmission of BBC broadcasts is an ex-McKinsey management consultant, whose understanding of engineering you could no doubt write on the back of a postage stamp.