Speeches by Hinds.

“This is an important piece of work from Alan Milburn, but what principles will underpin the Government’s approach? Does the Minister think that, other things being equal, if we increase the cost of employing people, then that will come at the expense of jobs? Does he think that, with slack in the labour market, if we d…”

“You mentioned having a core PSB offering and a separate subscription service. You also talked about BritBox—that was what BritBox did, was it not?”

“Although you are right that it did not match up to expectations or hopes in the domestic market, there was not a colossal public backlash against that idea of, “If you want to watch ‘The Good Life’ from the 1970s, it is on this subscription channel.” Q109 I notice that iPlayer now has its own little classics section, s…”

“But it is slightly different to talk about an ad/no ad thing. Unless I was really bad at looking, I think it was the case that you could get only a certain amount of BBC stuff going back only so far on iPlayer, and for the “classics”, you got BritBox. In covid, a lot of us, or our children, discovered classic comedy, b…”

“Very few people know that, though. More people knew what BritBox was. BritBox had ITV and Channel 4 branding, but it had heavy BBC branding, if I recall correctly.”

“Rob, you mentioned UKTV. If the BBC were to introduce advertising into its core UK offering that people recognise as the BBC, what would that do to the size of the advertising spend market? To what extent would it grow it? If it does not grow it, where does that spend come from?”

“Sorry to rush you, but of course there is a difference with some of those tech plays that you spoke about, because on terrestrial TV you cannot do programmatic advertising fully. That may change over time. In theory, if you can start doing the same targeting on telly and on radio as you can with online advertising, tha…”

“Yes, if you are signed in, but lots of people are still consuming radio and telly without being signed in, so you cannot track them as an individual, right?”

“Yes, that is the key question.”

“At all?”

“Who of everybody else do we think will suffer the most?”

“Has anybody done analysis of what would happen to the total available funding for British-produced content if you did not have a licence fee at all and were just reliant on ad revenue?”

“Germany is a very different country from ours. I have been scribbling down a few of the relevant differences. It has a written and recent constitution, and they are used to having political parties part paid for by the state. There is even a church tax where churches are funded through tax, and there are all the guilds…”

“They have a referendum for everything. They would have a referendum about a Toblerone.”

“It is an interesting question—whether three to five destinations at scale really is a stable equilibrium, and why there would not be just one.”

“Let me come on to that. If you had the super-PSB streamer, and you then had Netflix, Apple and Prime, all of which show their own stuff and some PSB stuff, and in some cases, do some cross-selling of other commercial services, and over it all you also had YouTube—or ubiquitous-tube—is that a stable equilibrium?”

“My final question is to you both. In this crazy world we live in, with infinite choice and daily brain overload, do you think that we might find people turning back to a renewed demand for channels, where somebody else has done the work for me?”

“My final question is to you both. In this crazy world we live in, with infinite choice and daily brain overload, do you think that we might find people turning back to a renewed demand for channels, where somebody else has done the work for me?”

“Marina, you said earlier that most BBC content is still watched on linear, but I think that is less true the younger you go down the age groups—in fact, over time, the proportion is shifting away. I want to come back to the conversation you just started on the iPlayer. There is some conversation at the moment, includin…”

“We grew up with variety until very recently, and the situation you have just described is not variety; it is bingeing. Maybe I am just being overly nostalgic. Is there a prospect that we might decide that what we had before was pretty good?”