Should the BBC pay Sky to appear on the satellite platform? Asks Julian Clover
Retrans fees, in the UK context the amount paid by broadcasters such as the BBC to appear on additional platforms such as Sky are back in the news. The catalyst has been John Tate, the corporation’s director of policy and strategy in an appearance on Radio 4’s The Media Show, who commented that after such a tight licence fee settlement the payment made to Sky for retransmission was not appropriate.
If this all sounds distinctly familiar then rewind to August 2010, when at the Edinburgh Television Festival, BBC director general Mark Thompson indulged in a little Murdoch-bashing, bringing in the $1 carriage fees that Fox was receiving in the US from Time Warner.
The BBC pays around £10 million per year in such costs on top of the costs of leasing the transponder capacity in the first place. The fees cover such things as making sure that the correct regional version of BBC One appears at 101 in the Sky EPG, a position that the BBC and other public broadcasters are assured through the intervention of the regulator.
In Edinburgh Thompson had enlisted the support of the other UK broadcasters that hold public service obligations, ITV, Channel 4 (still a public corporation) and Channel 5. Like the BBC the three other broadcasters run additional services that don’t necessarily have a public service remit. Indeed ITV has struck a separate deal with Sky that gives exclusivity to the HD versions of ITV2, ITV3 and ITV4.
There is no such must-carry as such in the UK, and what broadcaster would absent themselves from a platform with 10.4 million homes?
In Italy when the launch of TivuSat was accompanied by the possible loss of RAI and the Mediaset channels from Sky Italia, the broadcaster introduced a USB dongle that acted as a DTT tuner and seamlessly injected the missing channels into the Sky EPG.
Such a device would help out the BBC; when you read the fine print in Delivering Quality First, the corporation’s manifesto of cuts in the light of the licence fee settlement, a few smaller items can be found.
These include the withdrawal of some digital radio services from some platforms and the same for some regional TV news. My own regional news, for example, is an opt out of an opt out with a portion of satellite bandwidth and EPG charges paid for just 20 minutes a day. Such fees are the same for Cambridge as they are for Birmingham.
38% have Freeview on their main set, so under the BBC’s proposals families in affected areas would presumably have to decamp to the kids’ bedroom to watch the regional news.
Some would argue the BBC has form in non-payment of transmission fees. After all ISPs carry the iPlayer for nothing.
