Search Results

This chapter details the activities and beliefs of Equity. Equity believes that all UK broadcasters should have an obligation to contribute to the UK's cultural diversity through investing in original content production. It has lobbied Ofcom to increase quotas for original and regional drama, comedy, entertainment, and children's programmes made in and about the UK, particularly with respect to Channel 3 and 5 licencees. Equity has also worked with all of the major UK broadcasters towards developing new platforms for content delivery and has consistently sought to ensure that content can be made available for use on these platforms when made under Equity collective agreements. Most recently, Equity achieved the first agreement outside of the US for the engagement of its members and the reuse of their performances by Netflix.

Research commissioned by Ofcom categorises arts television as a genre ‘at risk’ of disappearing as relatively small audiences are unable to offset increased production costs. A decline is also evident in Ofcom's own research which finds that in the five years to 2011, spending on arts programming by the five main terrestrial broadcasters fell by 39 per cent. This decline is the confluence of a number of factors. Decreases in commissioning and production budgets mean fewer resources for producers. Within specialist factual genres such as arts, this can have a limiting effect on the coverage of the subject, access to expertise, and the aesthetics of the final programme. Without a deliberate strategy to save it, the downward trajectory of arts content on British public service broadcasting is unlikely to be reversed.

This chapter illustrates how ‘most of the Holyrood political class has been reluctant to explore the boundaries between the devolved and the reserved’, even on less life-and-death issues such as broadcasting. Conversely, it also tells of at least one post-devolution success story for classic informal pre-devolution-style ‘Scottish lobbying’ in Westminster. Scotland is presently one of the UK's leading audiovisual production centres, with Glasgow as the linchpin. The capacity of the Scottish Parliament to debate questions of media concentration but also its incapacity to act legislatively has been observed. There are both political and economic calculations behind the refusal to devolve powers over the media via the Communications Act 2003. Ofcom now has a key role in policing the terms of trade for regional production that falls within a public service broadcaster's target across the UK. The BBC's position as the principal vehicle of public service broadcasting has come increasingly under question. The Gaelic Media Service set up under the Communications Act 2003 has a line of responsibility to Ofcom in London. Scottish Advisory Committee on Telecommunications (SACOT) determined four key regulatory issues needing future attention by Ofcom.

This chapter explores the tensions generated by the fact that while cultural policy is devolved to Scotland, broadcasting policy is not. The chapter maps the ways in which Scottish interests are represented on UK regulatory bodies such as Ofcom and the BBC Trust and considers several incidents where tensions have exploded into public disputes. It explores the question of whether Scottish groups have been able to successfully articulate their legitimate concerns, and argues that the current situation may not be sustainable for either consumers or producers. The chapter suggests that the establishment of the Scottish Broadcasting Commission by the SNP minority government in 2007 represents a major challenge to the status quo.

Chapters 2 through 5 house the case studies for the book. Each chapter is sub-divided by country to give the reader a detailed understanding of the dynamics at play. Chapter 2 assesses the structural regulation of local television by focusing on a key issue in the debate over local television. It thus considers the FCC’s quadrennial ownership reviews in the United States, the fee-for-carriage debate in Canada, and Ofcom’s reviews of public service broadcasting in the United Kingdom. This chapter also introduces two key terms: public good and market failure. The chapter demonstrates how the local is bound so tightly to commercial markets, broadcasting technologies and the status quo that alternatives views are effective erased.

The influence of EU law on the United Kingdom was different from that in France and Greece. The United Kingdom had been at the forefront of the privatization revolution, and the British regulators had engaged in public consultations before the advent of the EU participatory mandates. However, this chapter puts forward a narrative that spans the last two centuries and demonstrates that EU law did indeed lead to consequential changes in institutional structures and practices in the United Kingdom. Public participation in administrative policymaking had been inconsistent with the prevailing perception of the British state in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The New Right and New Labour governments introduced important regulatory reforms but it was EU mandates that pushed significantly in the direction of formalized and institutionalized open public participation, adding impetus to and consolidating previous domestic initiatives. This chapter concludes by looking beyond the telecommunications sector and beyond national borders.