Public service broadcasting faces a defining moment
4 min read
We are approaching a clear moment of choice about the future of our media and the online world.
New technologies and advances in AI bring enormous opportunities, but also raise fundamental questions: How do we find trustworthy information? How should we reward and protect creativity? And will UK institutions continue to have a meaningful role in an ever-changing digital ecosystem?
Public service broadcasters have a critical role. They invest in content that represents and portrays communities authentically across the UK, produce news and current affairs that must meet the highest regulatory standards, and support talent that ensures the UK’s creative economy punches above its weight on a global stage.
However, as viewing habits shift towards connected TVs and platform-controlled interfaces, their business model is being fundamentally disrupted. At the same time, AI is transforming how content is created, distributed and consumed, raising profound questions about trust, copyright and the future of creative work.
That is why, in September, I brought the BBC’s consumer technology research and development lab, the 'Blue Room’, into Parliament to demonstrate how the latest developments in consumer technologies are already reshaping our media landscape.
One demonstration showed the increasingly complex journey audiences face in finding UK public service content on connected TVs. It is crucial that trusted UK public service broadcasters and trusted news providers remain visible and easily discoverable. We must ensure that audiences can continue to have easy access to the range of original content that public service broadcasters provide.
Sustainable funding for the BBC is absolutely vital for it to take bold, ambitious action and deliver on its mission in the age of AI and platforms
The government’s media green paper is exploring the future of public service media, including how to ensure it remains discoverable across digital and AI-mediated landscapes. We need to think now about the value of public service media, and the role of prominence, when audiences increasingly access content through global platforms.
The Blue Room also showed us how AI tools can rapidly generate music, video, and other creative outputs that imitate copyrighted British IP, underlining the need for responsible innovation that supports human creativity and protects creators’ rights.
The UK’s creative industries contribute £146bn to the economy, and we should ensure that AI innovation can develop alongside robust copyright protections. We need AI guardrails, copyright enforcement, and industry standards that protect human creativity and ensure creators retain control.
The team also demonstrated how easily images can be altered and trusted organisations misrepresented, which has profound consequences for public trust.
The BBC is already working with others to address this. It is a founding member of the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), which has created a trustworthy, standardised digital watermark to build trust in content and improve transparency on whether it has been altered or comes from a reliable source.
The BBC is also a founding member of the Standards for Publisher Usage Rights (SPUR) Coalition, which is campaigning to ensure that original journalism is used responsibly in AI systems and that publishers receive fair value for their content.
The government has a role to play here – it can be engaging with SPUR and ensuring that large technology companies come to the table and recognise the importance of trustworthy journalism in online spaces.
Clearly, there are lots of problems coming down the track in an increasingly fragmented online world, and the BBC is ambitious in delivering more within online spaces. But the BBC’s ability to go further in this ambition is tightly bound to funding.
Sustainable funding for the BBC is absolutely vital for it to take bold, ambitious action and deliver on its mission in the age of AI and platforms. Conversations about what the BBC looks like in the future have never been more important.
As we approach the government’s white paper on the future of the BBC, I’m not only thinking about the great dramas or news programmes – I’m thinking about how the white paper and BBC Charter decisions can ensure that British institutions can play a key role in the digital world of the future.
Victoria Collins is the Liberal Democrat MP for Harpenden and Berkhamsted
