Opinion
Tim Dams
Indie focus
takes a close
look at the
Digital Britain
report and
finds very little
to help boost
No easy funding solutions
funding for
producers
If you want to understand why it seems to be getting much harder to
make a living as a producer these days, Lord Carter’s Digital Britain report
makes an unlikely but illuminating guide. Running in at 236 pages, it’s a
weighty tome – and certainly not a read for the faint hearted. It first
recognises something we all know – that Britain’s creative content
industries punch way above their weight globally (one third of TV format
sales around the world originate with British production companies.)
Then it gets to the nub of the issue with a clear and unvarnished TIM DAMS
explanation of why there is less money going into production. Interestingly, Editor, Televisual
its conclusions seem to echo the sentiment – although not the forthright Tim Dams is editor
words – of ITV executive chairman Michael Grade’s claim last year, that of Televisual, and
Google and YouTube are ‘parasites’ feeding off content funders. was previously
The growth of internet aggregators, argues the Digital Britain report, assistant editor of
has been good for advertisers, who find cheap and direct routes to film title Screen
customers they need to reach. It’s also good for consumers, providing free International. He’s
search and extras like email, storage, mapping and access to social networks. also written
It’s not been so good for producers though. Because what the internet extensively for The
aggregators don’t do is fund the creation of long-form professional content. Guardian, Broadcast
“The unintended consequence” of all this is that ad revenue that used and Media Week.
to fund local content is now being “repatriated to the global aggregators.”
In other words, US search engines and their shareholders are siphoning
off much of the commercial money we used to fund our programmes with.
Making matters worse, producers that do manage to cobble together
funding for their content find that rampant digital piracy is eroding their
ability to profit from their efforts. Unfortunately for producers, the Digital
Britain report does not then go on to suggest how new money can be
found to go into production to compensate for the outflow of revenue to
US search engines. It seems to accept the new status quo with the following
words: “These changes have good features and inadvertent bad features.
But they are the facts of the digital age.”
Of course, the report contains welcome suggestions for improving the
lot of producers, in particular the plan to give Ofcom statutory powers to
tackle piracy. But most of the report’s many broadcasting policy proposals
are about recycling production money that is already in the system – and
not about providing new funds. Channel 4 gets nothing to directly address
its structural funding problems – apart from the consent to explore a tie-
up with BBC Worldwide. Funding for regional news on ITV and more
children’s programming look likely to come out of existing BBC funds.
In the end, Digital Britain was long on analysis and concrete proposals
like a phone tax to fund the roll out of a universal broadband infrastructure
in the UK. But it was short on backing for the producers who make the
content that will one day hopefully feed through all these new and costly
broadband pipes. in my view
Summer 2009 theproducer 9
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