The Public Media Alliance has published research from a comparative analysis of Public Service Media in the Age of Platforms. It provides an illuminating analysis of the difference between the promotion of programmes by genre in the ‘prime space’ on online video platforms compared to their prevalence in the prime time schedules on the main channel of their respective broadcasters.
The research is based on an analysis of the presentation of the online video services of ten public service broadcasters in six countries, including the United Kingdom.
They looked at what they called the ‘prime space’ on the home page of the respective online services that is visible without scrolling. The aim was to compare this to the ‘prime time’ scheduling of the main channels of each organisation.
The study, based on data from November 2023, suggests that most of the services appeared to follow services like Netflix in terms of genre profile, featuring fiction, entertainment, and documentary programmes.
Fiction was prominent on all the services surveyed, together with entertainment and documentary programmes.
News was notably absent from the ‘prime space’ on the BBC iPlayer and ITVX, although it was represented on the 4 service from Channel 4, the only service to feature news.
The study suggests that the limited ‘prime space’ on screen represents a challenge for balancing new programming and curating an archive. This is a particular problem for public service media if their online video platforms are supposed to work as a ‘front door’ to their entire portfolio.
In seeking to compete with the fiction catalogues of well-funded online video subscription services, public service media providers are limiting the promotion of other genres, like news and current affairs, on which their public service credentials are supposedly based.
The report makes a number of recommendations, including greater use of personalisation and using strategies that set public service media apart from global online video subscription services.
Public service media organisations should be incentivised to implement personalisation based on articifial intelligence to meet public service obligations and user expectations in an on-demand driven media culture. Personalisation should be regarded as part of their basic functionalities and not as a threat to the core values of universality, diversity and quality. However, they should strike a balance between editorial curation and personalisation to drive up viewing and to broaden choice of programming.
The study recommends that public service media organisations should employ programming strategies that set them apart from global players, employing a broader mix of genres in what they call ‘prime space’. They should also exploit the cultural-political and linguistic benefits of being a native television company with a deep knowledge of the everyday life, taste segments and agendas of its users in a specific national or regional context.