• by Andy Oakes  @andyoakes, March 14, 2014

Last week, we saw the BBC announce that it was planning to close BBC Three as a broadcast channel and shift it to an online-only channel through its iPlayer platform. There was the usual outcry on social media but in the cold light of day, it seems the obvious move. The BBC needs to save £100 million and BBC Three costs £85 million.

For those not familiar with the channel, BBC Three is ‘youth orientated’ with a heavy bias to comedy, with a mix of home-grown productions and US imports. Its viewing figures have been pretty poor of late and a move to digital-only platform makes sense. There’s lots of evidence that the youth market is watching on demand and on the move with mobile device viewing figures on the up and up. Twenty-five percent of viewing by 16-24 year olds is to catch-up or other screens and over the next few years that is expected to reach 40% (BBC figures).

Now whether you take this view or the view that BBC Three simply wasn’t very good, it does throw up some interesting possibilities for the BBC. Later in the week, we also heard that a BBC review proposed scrapping the licence fee in favour of subscriptions. A 12-strong panel established by James Purnell, the corporation’s director of strategy and digital is said to have made the recommendation to the BBC’s executive board. However, on Saturday night the BBC denied the claim. But that doesn’t mean it’s an idea that shouldn’t be considered. David Elstein, a former Sky and ITV television executive, who was a member of the review panel, said: “It makes more sense for the BBC to move to subscription from 2020, which is about the date when set-boxes go, and standard definition is phased out to high definition.”

Of course, it does. It makes huge sense. Because as well as the usual broadcast rivals, BBC digital execs have been getting particularly interested in the rise of services such as Netflix, especially now they are in the business of content creation with recent success stories such as ‘House of Cards’ and ‘Orange Is the New Black’. 

And they are already laying the groundwork. The BBC Trust has approved plans to allow users to pay to download programmes from an online BBC Store. The BBC iPlayer will be extended to offer programmes free up to 30 days after broadcast and will include links to allow users to buy programmes from the BBC Store, which will be run by BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the corporation. The BBC iPlayer, available as part of the public service (paid for by the annual licence fee) in the United Kingdom, plans to extend the free catch-up window for viewing programmes from 7 to 30 days. Search will be integrated across catch-up and commercially available programmes, with a “seamless purchasing experience” through a “single BBC account registration” Sound familiar, Netflix users?

But why only for overseas users who use BBC Worldwide? Why not look at new commercial models? We put up with this from every other broadcaster so why not the BBC? Surely, the time has come to modernise.

There are some of you who might think we’ve been here before. Many will remember the Project Kangaroo disaster, the last effort to establish a similar model of selling online video outside the catch-up window, which did not pass the Competition Commission rules.

But the broadcast world and, perhaps more pointedly, the political world are very different places now. There is a growing feeling that the BBC is overly subsidised and needs to stand on its own two feet more than it does. And it is certainly becoming increasingly apparent that it will need to do it digitally and by exploring innovative new models, both creatively and commercially. There may be a nostalgic view of what the BBC has been but that’s not one the former viewers of BBC Three will hold and neither will many of that generation. The time to change is now.