Image: Flickr / Luke Wroblewski
What does it take to make a national broadcaster? A national service should be freely available in all homes for adults and children without the barriers of encryption or subscription. The United Nations’ educational and cultural body, UNESCO, suggested in 2005 that public service broadcasting might have ‘an important role to play in providing access and participation in public life’; it would serve ‘the interests of people as citizens rather than as consumers’; it would assist in ‘strengthening civil society’ and it would be ‘a unique service providing universal access to information and knowledge’ (2005).
This piece argues that the universal service principle in British broadcasting is now under pressure in two ways. Firstly it has been suggested that BBC programmes should in future be encrypted and provided as availability within the United Kingdom. Secondly, the emergence of a new kind of spectrum scarcity – stemming largely from the expansion of new mobile phone and data services – is causing spectrum to be withdrawn from broadcasters and re-allocated to mobile providers. Data and video are now the powerful drivers of mobile traffic.
