If it tries to hang on to its traditional sporting strongholds, it could end up spending so much money on buying the rights that it risks diluting the quality of the rest of its output. But if it lets the sport go, its audience share could drop sharply, making it difficult to sustain, let alone increase, the licence fee.The BBC is now competing, when it bids for the crowd-pleasers, against other broadcasters who can extract, in hard cash, the full commercial value of those programmes. The sports bodies had not woken up the enormous value of their product.That all changed with the advent of Sky TV. Rupert Murdoch was very quick to realise the huge power of exclusive sports coverage and has bid aggressively for the rights to major events, notably football. The rapid growth of Sky is bringing its total revenues close to those of BBC television. With no public service obligations and much smaller overheads it now regularly outbids the BBC for the right to sporting events.As a result the BBC finds itself in another difficult dilemma. In the old days of the cosy duopoly with ITV, sport could be relied on to deliver large audiences for relatively low outlays.
People were used to watching sport on BBC and historically the television rights to big sporting events were sold cheaply. BBC and ITV negotiators could argue that they were benefiting the sport by giving it free publicity. They concern the ever rising cost of buying the programmes with mass appeal, which the BBC needs to get good overall ratings, and which in turn are needed to make the licence fee politically acceptable.This problem is well recognised inside the industry, but barely understood outside The obvious example is sport, a mainstay of BBC programming. On the contrary, the spin-off could achieve the best of both worlds: public purchase to guarantee standards, private provision to maximise efficiency and minimise waste of the licence fee.Although the digital revolution is an important spur to the latest changes at the BBC, the underlying problems faced by the corporation are older and deeper. It is committed to using licence payers' money to make and buy programmes which are then transmitted free on air Hiving off BBC Resources will not change this central fact. It may mean that some part of the programme-making process will be carried out in the private sector rather than by a BBC employee. But the licence fee will still be used to purchase the material for which the BBC is famous - comprehensive and impartial news and current affairs, expensive costume dramas, programmes which cater for minorities, etc.Worries that spinning off BBC Resources will turn the BBC gradually into a privatised American-style broadcaster are completely misplaced.
The programme makers would compare the costs of BBC Resources with those on offer in the private sector. And any investment by BBC Resources in new facilities would have to be justified by the prospective returns.There are obvious analogies between this proposal and what has been happening in the Health Service.The buzzword is the purchaser/provider split. If the BBC goes into partnership with companies in the private sector it can borrow, under the government's Private Finance Initiative, what it needs to stay at the technological frontier. The government is committed to buying health services and making them available free to the user, but that does not mean it has to build the hospitals or employ all the caterers, etc, who work in them.The same is true of the BBC.
