Reflections on UK Digital Economy Bill
Keynote
Speech by Adam Singer: Chairman, British Screen Advisory Council, on
Friday 19 February 2010 at the Canadian Film and Television
Production Association (CFTPA) Prime Time in Ottawa Conference in
Ottawa, Canada.
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I
am going to talk about the UK Digital Britain report and the
resulting UK Digital Economy Bill. That’s a real ‘abandon hope,
rush for Starbucks’ killer sentence. Don’t panic! As Stephen
Leacock almost said, “It's called ‘digital economy’ because it
has nothing to do with either digital or economy.” So let’s
start with a tour of UK media and how its protagonists, and
regulators, are coping with the digital plague, and see if we have
found a ‘cure’. But you don’t know me well enough yet to risk
irony, so the problem is how do I do this without descending into a
warm bath of English parochialism that’s comforting for me but
excluding for you?
An
experience I once had reassures me that we should manage. I was
involved in a franchise hoping to provide multichannel cable TV to a
still British Hong Kong.
The
under Minister responsible for communications had those thin lips
that drizzle smiles onto supplicants and said, “We have studied
cable television in the United States and Europe. You must realize
that Hong Kong is unique, that Hong Kong’s cable television must
reflect Hong Kong’s uniqueness, if it’s to serve the unique needs
of Hong Kong.”
I
muttered obsequious agreement and asked what form this uniqueness
should take.
He
said, “In Hong Kong we want channels dedicated to movies, channels
dedicated to sports and entertainment, channels for children and
channels showing pop videos; a few documentary channels, and maybe
some late night adult dalliance, but not too much, as the population
density is high enough.”
Plus
ca change: so in the spirit that the universalities are greater than
local differences, I will press on, and hope that the UK sounds
vaguely familiar.
There
are roughly 26 million UK TV households. Half take pay TV, at an
average spend of around C$600 per year, and that does not include the
C$240 compulsory annual licence fee for the BBC.
9
million-ish homes get pay TV from Rupert Murdoch’s Sky satellite
service; 3.1 million homes get pay TV from Virgin Cable (that’s a
brand, not a description of the plant), and about half a million get
pay TV from British Telecom.
40%
of UK homes are getting free, over-the-air multichannel digital
terrestrial television, and about 10% are still five channel analogue
only, but they will be switched off in 2012 when the UK Government
sends the last analogue TV sets to a Swiss clinic for the digitally
challenged.
In
addition, 70% (80% in Urban areas) are on the internet; there are
movies on your Xbox, and assorted forms of catch-up TV. The Economist
tells me that the Brits spend more time on social network sites than
North Americans, but less than Australians - but there isn’t much
in it. In other words the UK is similar to any other western media
economy.
I
suspect as here TV viewing is holding up, but the increased number of
TV services means that audiences are getting fragmented. Where once a
show on the publicly owned BBC, or its commercial rival ITV,
regularly commanded audiences of 20 million, now a good audience is
under half this. We do have programmes that allege ‘Britain has
talent’, or involve sports, that still get large audiences, but
it’s getting rarer.
Excluding
pay per view there are over 500 channels in the UK, including an
impressive diversity of documentary services showing ‘Hitler’s
Generals’, ‘Hitler’s Tank Victories’, ‘Kayak’s - Their
Role in Hitler’s Defeat’, and of course, the ever popular
‘Hitler’s Downfall: Rainwear of World War 2 in Colour’.
The
UK music industry generated almost C$6 billion in 2008. DVD sales are
declining, but movie theatres are thriving. In the UK we define the
creative industries as including TV, film, music, print, live
theatre, but also architecture and fashion. In total they generated
C$98 billion to the UK economy in 2007: that’s 4.5% of GDP, making
it the second largest sector in the UK after finance.
The
debate in UK broadcasting is concerned with many familiar issues
including; how do you define public service broadcasting (PSB)?
On
You Tube there are hours of material from quantum physics to
improving your musicianship, or on National Geographic there is
anthropology and science, both examples of a modern non-traditional
public service broadcaster. Once public service broadcasting was
defined as what the BBC, or CBC, or WGBH did. Now that PSB can no
longer be defined by the unique output of an institution, how do you
save what you can’t define, if that output is no longer unique?
How
long can we support traditional public service broadcasting? If
television audiences are fragmenting, how do we pay for major drama?
As audiences for current affairs and documentaries wane, how do you
save investigative TV journalism?
Can
you preserve democracy if your citizenry don’t have access to
impartial and unbiased news? This is an important question to us
Brits, as we believe in the stainless steel grail of impartial
television news, bestowed upon the populace, so that if one strays
into the hell fire of Fox News, or the hallucinogens of Al Jezeera,
or worst of all, the English language version of France 24, there
will be an unbiased British public service news to ‘detox’ with.
Canada
has a proud tradition in factual programming - I think Canada was the
first country to be allowed to make documentaries in Communist China
- and I would suspect you are going through similar anxieties about
how one keeps making this type of programme for shrinking audiences?
The
significant local UK twist is the equivalent of C$6 billion that is
the UK tax on TV ownership - known as the television licence fee –
put into the media economy via the BBC. You can’t understand UK
media without acknowledging the BBC.
If
I have understood CBC’s 2008/9 Annual Report, entitled ‘Great
Success and Greater Challenges (in the UK, whenever you see the word
‘challenge’ juxtaposed with ‘success’, you know you are being
dipped in corporate babble - I am sure that can’t be true here?)
I
believe that CBC broadcasts to 13 million Canadian households and has
a revenue of roughly C$1.8 billion. The BBC broadcasts to 26 million
homes, receives an annual licence per home of C$240, plus commercial
activities and other grants, giving it a total revenue equivalent to
C$7.7 billion. The BBC has twice the homes of CBC but is four times
richer.
You
can add the Canadian Film Board, plus other sources of provincial
media aid. In the UK you can add the Government-owned but
advertising- supported Channel Four, plus tax breaks for our small
feature film industry: it makes little difference to the direction of
these numbers. In the UK we are spending roughly C$320/350 of public
support per UK home per year on TV and film, and this excludes the
money that goes to the Arts. We do not have a blank media levy, as
you do, but there are those in the UK that would love increased
public support through an additional levy, as compensation for piracy
and diminishing audiences.
Public
money is a significant act of intervention in UK media, but this is
not a judgment about whether it’s good or bad, or socially
enhancing, but a statement about the nature of the cash flowing
though much of the UK media economy.
I
bet there are Canadian content makers who would like similar levels
of commitment to the Canadian cultural economy. Be careful of what
you wish for, the lesson from the UK is that when you have that many
jobs supported by that much public money you are in a constant debate
about institutional preservation, as opposed to encouraging
innovation.
The
way I think about the UK’s public funding of its broadcast economy
is that most of us have areas in our lives where we spend
disproportionate amounts of money on things we love. It might be
fishing, or stamp collecting, or fashion. We call them hobbies and -
like people - every country should have a hobby, in the UK it’s our
public broadcasting system.
But
an aside - in the UK we were the number three creator of video games
in the world, now number four, heading for number five - you
Canadians beat us out of the number three slot, I believed unfairly,
as you issued assorted forms of closet state aid to boost your games
industry, i.e. tax breaks and pay incentives. However, while writing
this talk and looking at the UK’s public broadcasting, not as
culture but as interventionist cash, I felt my moral high ground on
the games issue wobbling.
In
the UK public broadcasting is our hobby; we see our own hobbies as
harmless, gentle pastimes. Collecting stamps is an engaging
diversion. “I have forcibly evicted my neighbour to get his house
to store my stamp collection” could be deemed a tad compulsive, but
the thing about hobbies is that if you had run out of storage room
for your stamps that would seem a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
We are seldom aware when our pastime has strayed into obsession and
is diverting us from what we should be doing.
Hobbies,
like alcohol, are OK in moderation, but you can get obsessive and
addicted. There are those in Britain who wonder what else we could do
if we were not so consumed with our hobby of public service
broadcasting. Maybe we should join a 12-step programme to help with
PSB addiction?
“Good
evening, my name is Great Britain, I am a public broadcasting-oholic.
It’s been a week of bad craving, wanting just one more public news
service, but then I realize there is no such thing as social public
broadcasting. It always starts as a little local financed news
service, and by next morning I am on a global satellite news binge.”
As
a UK citizen I would be reassured if we were putting more of our TV
tax/licence money into a wider portfolio of new media investments,
not least games.
That
said the BBC provides UK citizens with their most viewed television,
across four national TV channels; the most listened to radio, on
eight national channels; dozens of regional variants, and websites.
It funds orchestras and writers, and pushes broadband connection with
their catch-up service iPlayer. It gives an outlet for politicians
and, most of all, generates a wide range of cultural reference points
that contribute to our national identity. Opinion polls show it’s
popular, there is little resentment about paying the licence fee, and
it’s going through a golden age with great programmes - especially
documentaries - which are unlikely to be made by others.
But
the BBC’s glory rests on the dictatorial philosophy that you ‘can’t
trust the public to know what’s good for them.’ This is not
necessarily the BBC’s position, but part of a political consensus
that has evolved over the years, where the UK voter is given little
say. I would freely pay the BBC C$240 a year. The sadness is I am not
trusted to vote for them with my cash.
In
an era of monolithic broadcasting supply, compulsion was
understandable but compulsion is hard to maintain when you exist in a
world of increasing choice. Imagine walking into Indigo, or Barnes
and Noble, and once past the door you were not allowed to move into
the building until you paid a compulsory C$240 and in return were
made to take a stack of books - some wonderful, some desirable, and
many of no interest at all - and only after you had paid this
entrance fee were you allowed to move into the rest of the shop to
purchase what you will.
This
is analogous to how the UK licence fee works in a free market of AV
product. I believe that compulsory
licence fees and culture taxes go against
the trend, that it’s hard to maintain the dictate of provision
against a wave of democratization. But as you will hear, in this
rising sea of information you might yet feel there is a need to
preserve national culture and identity through tax.
Why
has he inflicted all this on us? Because this is not a debate about a
British institution, it’s about traditional analogue suppliers and
you have plenty of them here: they are all variants on the issue of
dictated supply. For the purposes of this talk the BBC becomes a
metaphor for all of us raised in the limited supply of the analogue
world. The question at the heart of this becomes what is a BBC, or
PBS, or CBC, or an NHK in a post-broadcast world? By comparison with
the fecundity of digital, all legacy analogue suppliers look like -
if not monopolies, then oligopolies, and oligopolies rest on the
collective dictate of a fettered market.
How
can we guarantee the creation of all that music, drama and
documentaries that our generation loved if the compulsion
is removed? .... Maybe we can’t.
Now
‘digital’ has become another one of those babble words: it’s
just three enervated syllables describing rebased economics. Rebased
economics means no barriers, no boundaries, and no borders.
The
broadcast media world we knew was based on those three ‘b’s’.
With those barriers gone there is little scarcity in a recording, and
we were all in the scarce recording business. How do we preserve what
we know, what we are comfortable with, if dictated culture is
removed, once the boundaries are down?
Now
it’s a truism to say there is no geography in a net world, but if
there is no geography, who are you? And with that we come to a major
routine in the software of our brains. It’s identity: the deep,
tribal, ‘are you one of us or one of them’ question? We humans
are economic units, hard wired for scale - the scale conferred by
family, tribe, and nation; the scale conferred by religion, ideology,
and community; the scale driven by identity.
Wikipedia
tell me that the leitmotiv of CBC has been its role in maintaining
Canadian identity. This was easier when we thought geography defined
our identity, in this era national identity is a set of shared
cultural references. What differentiates Canadians from Puerto
Ricans, or the English from the Scots is no longer geography but
cultural references. It always was, but now national identity is
shared cultural references stored in binary code, available anywhere.
True,
this shared set of references may have a cluster bias to specific
geographic nodes, like Blue Jays fans in Toronto; but if you live in
a house in Ulam Bator, and courtesy of broadband and home delivery
you have never ventured out of the house, only consumed Last Mountain
Saskatoon Berry Jam, Canadian Club and maple syrup; your only media
is Canadian publications, Canadian Radio, Canadian TV and sports, you
absorb Canadian political debate - when it’s not prorogued - and
endless listening to Bryan Adams, k. d. lang, and Leonard Cohen –
who induces a slight melancholia that can only be cured by visiting
newfiejokes.net - are you a Canadian or a Mongolian? A Canadian of
course! Sure there is more to being Canadian than just those
references, but you can have as many Canadian references as you like,
anywhere.
That’s
why the net is so threatening to those poor Mongolian Parents in Ulam
Bator who are bemoaning, “Oh Chengis, you can’t build a yurt,
ride a horse and recite the secret history of our people. All we
hear is, Alexandre Bilodeau, and could we send a yak to Maelle Ricker
and what about those Senators fighting with sticks for Mr. Stanley’s
beaker?
Anyone
with even a cursory knowledge of Quebec, or Northern Ireland, or the
Basques, knows you brush with identity at your peril. Underneath the
calm reason of our media debate is this identity issue seeping
odourless, like radon accumulating in a basement.
I
mentioned earlier how an increased supply of media has fragmented
audiences for traditional broadcasters. Likewise, the web means a
horde of references that fragment notions of national identity.
That’s fine if you believe travel - albeit broadband - broadens the
mind; not so fine if you believe that it ‘sluttifies’ your
society and mocks your deity. Here lies fear, as we all have borders,
boundaries and barriers we wish to preserve.
Where
once allegiance to territory meant allegiance to community, we are
now caught in a gap where allegiance to territory and allegiance to
community are increasingly different things. Al Qaeda is an example
of those who use the web to work for a triumph of community over
loyalty to their respective states. This is not new: major religions
have always been about a community that transcends territoriality,
and history is full of martyrs, whose allegiance to religious
community trumped their allegiance to state. It’s in these issues
of allegiance to cultural references that there is reason to be
afraid ‘cause here lie the identity wars of the net world.
Luther
disrupted Europe with a community over geography concept, armed with
merely a printing press. What could be wrought now? What happens when
an irresistible homogeneous force meets an immovable cultural
reference?
In
this era ‘country first’ politics get hazy. For example, I have a
good Canadian friend: we have been corresponding for over 45 years
and he argues for preserving Canadian jobs for Canadians but in a
world where community trumps geography does this include my cultural
Canadian in Ulam Bator?
In
the UK public broadcasting policy is concerned with historic
geography issues and is yet to focus on the trend towards community.
So
if national identity is important to you, you may well argue for more
state-funded media as a cultural reference generator to reinforce
notions of identity, more money for public service content and for
broadband distribution systems to carry it. At the very least you may
realize that in this geography-free world the title ‘UK Digital
Economy Bill’ is a tad oxymoronic, as every act of digitization
erodes borders and fragments notions of what it is to be British.
So
to quote the website: ‘The Digital Economy Bill sets out Government
plans to ensure the UK is at the leading
edge
of the global digital economy.’ Now you didn’t need me to fly
here to tell you to go to the website. My role is to provide you
with the most important philosophical tool since Plato invented the
cave.
It’s
called the Dude-O-meter. If the word ‘dude’ sticks, if it bonds
to a sentence like superglued Lego, then you know you have entered a
fifth
dimension
where
language no longer conveys meaning, an area which we call the
Banality Zone. ‘See
what happens when you add ‘dude’ to any well-known phrase, or
saying, about the internet. “Woh the internet it’s like the
biggest thing since the printing press dude.” Yup, sticks nicely!
Dude’ does not stick to the artfully wrought, ‘to suffer the
slings and arrows of outrageous fortune dude,’ does not resonate.
‘I could drink a case of you’ ..dude’, and dude quails before
the art. The problem with the internet is that it’s so huge that
descriptors wither and language slithers into banality. The
Dude-O-meter is just a test for the blindingly obvious, and shows
where thought has shrivelled before the enormity of the subject,
‘It’s the consumer dude’, ‘the net it’s too big Dude’ and
this is why ‘dude’ sticks nicely to many Government exhortations
about the net, i.e. the UK’s new Bill, with its gotta be ‘at
the leading edge of the global digital economy’ dude’.
This
UK Bill came from The Digital Britain Report: This wanted Upgrading
and modernizing of our digital networks. It
had a vision of guaranteeing a universal 2mb for all, knowing that if
we could manage that most speeds would be higher. This would be paid
for by a household telephone line tax, but this didn’t make it into
the Bill.
The bill does call for: A dynamic
investment climate for UK digital content, (this
so deserves a ‘dude’):
This is the perennial how do we create a silicon valley in the UK?
That’s hard, as Silicon Valley wasn’t created by command, it
grew.
UK content for UK users: content of quality and scale
that serves the interests, experiences and needs of all UK citizens;
in particular impartial news, comment and
analysis.
I
think in Canada you too are concerned about local news and have
introduced measures to sustain it. In the UK we are considering
IFNC’s Independently Financed News Consortia, an attempt to use
public money in partnership with private entities to sustain regional
TV news, which can no longer be sustained. This is brave, and every
time I hear the phrase IFNC, I hear the mournful tune of Lady
Franklin’s lament.
“I dreamed a dream and I thought it true Concerning Franklin and
his gallant crew.”
You all know how that ends! See what I mean about addicted to PSB?
Fairness and access for all: universal availability
coupled with the skills and digital literacy to enable near-universal
participation in the digital economy and digital society.
How do we get every citizen to be a digital participant?
A laudable aim, but it’s amazing how much we have done for
ourselves without government. This is the ‘digital divide’ issue,
the ‘who has access to the on ramp of the information super
highway’, as we used to say back in the 90s. This is to recast
information politics into early 20ieth century industrial politics.
There is no such thing as the digital divide. As there was no such
thing as a refrigerator divide, or TV set divide, or telephone
divide. All tech’ worth having gets adopted fast, and gets cheap
fast. Computers cost less than TV sets back when we achieved 95%
penetration of TV sets, and everyone will soon have an iphone.
‘Digital divide’ is a phrase used by politicians struggling to
find their relevance to the debate, and ‘digital divide’ is
babble for the real issue, poverty.
How
do we reduce piracy?
The Bill introduces obligations
on ISPs – to send
notifications to subscribers infringing
copyright, and make this data available to rights holders on an
anonymised basis. This would allow the rights holder to apply for a
court order for the name and address of infringers, and to take legal
action. This is pretty controversial among the
ISPs who don’t want to be policemen. In addition, the regulator
Ofcom could be asked to draw up a code for these offences that could
include bandwidth capping.
The Bill provides a flexible approach for online
copyright issues. This allows the Minister to amend the UK Copyright
Act for the purpose of preventing online copyright infringement. This
is known as the Henry Vlll clause, as it’s pure power for the
Minister to wield, it’s like the magical sword the bad sorcerer has
in a fantasy novel. If you could have a smite-tastic sword like this
in World of Warcraft, you would pay anything for it!
Some say the UK Government has been over-lobbied by the
legacy recording industries - particularly music. To quote one MP
close to the process, “I have never dined so well as I have in the
last few months working on this Bill.” It’s easy to forget that
copyright is a compact between society and creator, not just a law
for the ‘Majors’.
I
am reluctant to say more on this Bill, as an election is looming and
how much of it will survive - if any - is a moot.
So
as you leave the room, being a genteel and discerning audience, you
will ask, “What the hell was that all about?”
Well;
institutional public service broadcasting has moved from living to
hobby, and in the old adage it’s not wise to let your hobbies
become your living.
You
can’t have audience fragmentation without cultural fragmentation.
Thus the Internet redefines identity, and identity issues are
disruptive. Tish and piffle you say, as the reality of where one’s
feet are placed trumps the realities of a screen. The trend is
ever-rising levels of information, and every time bandwidth increases
so does our level of engagement. Print, movie, TV, video game, modern
3D - look back over 20 years of video game development and you can
see the trajectory, where the only difference between reality and a
game is the level of information.
Regulation
is a synonym for border, barrier and boundary conditions: what is
regulation if these are rebased? How do you avoid preservation
regulation that props up the old and inhibits the new? Good
regulation in this world will be bottom up not top down; by that I
mean internet regulation must be like Asimov’s Laws of Robotics,
three laws from which consequences and boundaries grow. Internet
regulation will be recursive, fractal, coral- like, accumulating into
protective reefs.
A
final thought. I admit to being unhampered by knowledge about Canada
but there seems to me a resilient sense of Canadian identity. I
believe this strongly because when I was a14 year old walking the
autumnal parks of London, my Canadian friend, George, used to hit me
whenever I accidentally trod on a maple leaf.
I
believe that the countries and companies that do well are those with
the right culture for the circumstances; because, or in spite of, the
cultural zephyrs from the US, France and Britain you have been inured
in the ‘who are we question’, from the beginning, and this may
give Canada exactly the right cultural DNA for this era.
We
were raised in an era of institutional depth, held together by
vertical integration, and now we are in an era of fragmented breadth,
held together by search. But it’s only tech, and there is nothing
new in any of this, it’s merely the form it takes. It’s not the
rate of change that’s accelerating, it’s the periods of stasis
that are diminishing: a subtle, but useful, difference. Every
generation feels threatened by the newly invented bandwidth it wasn’t
raised with, and cries ‘get your nose out of that book, that
picture palace, that comic, that television, that video game’, yet
somehow we always seem to manage.
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