BBC

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC, also known as the Beeb or Auntie) is the largest broadcasting corporation in the world, founded in 1922. It produces programmes and information services, broadcasting on television, radio, and the Internet. The mission of the BBC is to inform, educate and entertain, and the motto of the BBC is Nation Shall Speak Peace Unto Nation.

Its domestic programming and broadcasts are primarily funded by levying television licence fees (Under the 1947 Wireless & Telegraphy Act) upon separately owned or rented Premises with televisual equipment on the premises either capable of receiving the BBC TV signal or which is used to access BBC TV programmes online through their computer, although there is also money raised through commercial activities such as sale of merchandise and in order to justify the licence fee the BBC is expected to produce a number of high-rating shows in addition to programmes that commercial broadcasters would not normally broadcast.

Quite often domestic audiences have affectionately referred to the BBC as the Beeb, or as Auntie; the latter originating in the somewhat fuddy duddy Auntie knows best attitude dating back to the early days when John Reith was in charge.

History

The original British Broadcasting Company was founded in 1922 by various private firms to broadcast experimental radio services. The first transmission was on 14 November of that year.

The Company, with John Reith as general manager, became the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1927 when it was granted a Royal Charter of incorporation and ceased to be privately owned. It started experimental television broadcasting in 1932, becoming a regular service (known as the BBC Television Service) in 1936. Television broadcasting was suspended from September 1, 1939 to June 7, 1946 during the Second World War.

Competition to the BBC was introduced for the first time in 1955 with the commercially and independently operated ITV. The BBC introduced a second TV channel, (BBC 2), in 1964, renaming the existing channel BBC 1. BBC 2 was broadcast in colour from July 1, 1967, and was joined by BBC 1 and ITV on November 15, 1969.

Since the deregulation of the UK television and radio market in the 1980s, the BBC has faced increased competition from the commercial sector (and from the advertiser-funded public service broadcaster Channel 4), especially on satellite television, cable television, and digital television services.

The BBC Research Department has played a major part in the development of broadcasting and recording techniques. In the early days it carried out essential research into acoustics, programme level measurement, and noise measurement and established standards that rapidly spread, particularly throughout the British Empire. In this respect it filled a role that is now lacking in many areas, since it was motivated by the desire for quality, not profit.

The Corporation

Royal Charter

The BBC is a quasi-autonomous Public Corporation operating as a public service broadcaster incorporated under a Royal Charter reviewed on a 10 yearly basis, currently run by a board of governors appointed by the government for a term of four years (formerly five years), though this is soon to be replaced with a BBC Trust. The BBC is required by its charter to be free from both political and commercial influence and answers only to its viewers and listeners.

The BBC's Royal Charter is currently under review. Although the Charter is widely expected to be renewed in 2006, some proposals have suggested dramatic changes.

The BBC itself suggested radical changes in its "Building Public Value" proposals published in June 2004.

On 2 March 2005 the Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell published a green paper setting out her proposals for the future of the BBC. The main points of this were:

• Maintenance of the licence fee system until at least 2016
• Abolition of the BBC Governors, to be replaced by a "BBC Trust"
• Increasing outsourcing of production (a process already started by Mark Thompson)
• Reduced emphasis on "ratings for ratings' sake" and copycat programmes (such as reality television).

In March 2006 the Culture Secretary published a white paper on the future of the BBC.

Corporate Structure

• Governance Unit
• Programming Groups
  • News
  • Drama Entertainment & CBBC
  • Factual & Learning
  • Sport
• Broadcasting Groups
  • World Service
  • TV
  • New Media & Technology
  • Radio & Music
  • Nations & Regions
• Professional Services
  • Strategy (formerly Strategy and Distribution and merged with Policy and Legal)
  • Marketing, Comms and Audiences
  • Finance Property & Business Affairs
  • BBC People (to 2004, Human Resources & Internal Communications)
  • BBC Training & Development
• Commercial Groups
  • BBC Resources Ltd
  • BBC Worldwide Ltd

Management

The BBC is a nominally autonomous corporation, independent from direct government intervention. It is run by an appointed Board of Governors. General management of the organisation is in the hands of a Director-General appointed by the governors.

Finance

The BBC has the largest budget of any UK broadcaster; its annual budget is approximately £3.8 billion.

Revenue

The principal means of funding the BBC is through the television licence, currently costing around £11 a month if paid by direct debit. Such a licence is required to operate a broadcast television receiver within the UK. The cost of a television licence is set by the government and enforced by the criminal law but the revenue is collected privately and does not pass through the state before reaching the BBC, and hence it is inaccurate to refer to the BBC as a "state" broadcaster.

Income from commercial enterprises and from overseas sales of its catalogue of programmes has substantially increased over recent years.

According to the BBC's 2005 Annual Report [1], its income can be broken down as follows:

• £2,940.3m licence fees collected from consumers.
• £624.3m from BBC Commercial Businesses.
• £247.2m from the World Service, of which £225.1m is from grants (primarily funded by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office), £16.7m from subscriptions, and £5.4m from other sources.
• £23.5m from other income, such as providing content to overseas broadcasters and concert ticket sales.

Expenditure

The BBC gives the following figures for expenditure of licence fee income:

• 35% - BBC One
• 15% - BBC Two
• 15% - local TV and radio
• 12% - network radio
• 10% - digital (BBC Three, BBC Four, BBC News 24, BBC Parliament, CBBC, CBeebies)
• 10% - transmission costs and licence fee collection
• 3% - BBC Online, Ceefax, and Interactive Content (including bbc.co.uk and BBCi)

Headquarters and Regional Offices

Broadcasting House in Portland Place, London is the official headquarters of the BBC. It is home to the national radio networks Radio 2, 3, 4, 6 Music, and BBC 7. On the front of the building are statues of Prospero and Ariel (from Shakespeare's The Tempest), by Eric Gill.

Broadcasting House is currently undergoing renovation, scheduled for completion in 2010. As part of a major reorganisation of BBC property, Broadcasting House is to become home to BBC News (both television and radio), national radio, and the BBC World Service. The major part of this plan involves the demolition of the two post-war extensions to the building and construction of a new building, to be of equal "architectural creativity", beside the existing structure. While the rebuilding process is being undertaken many of the BBC Radio networks have been relocated to other buildings in the vicinity of Portland Place.

In 2007/2008 BBC News is expected to relocate from the News Centre at BBC Television Centre to the refurbished Broadcasting House in what is being described as "one of the world's largest live newsrooms".

By far the largest concentration of BBC staff in the UK exists in White City. Well known buildings in this area include TVC (internal acronym for BBC Television Centre), White City, Media Centre, Broadcast Centre and Centre House.

As well as the various BBC buildings in London, there are major BBC production centres located in Cardiff, Belfast, Glasgow, Birmingham, Manchester, Bristol, Southampton and Newcastle upon Tyne. There are also many smaller local and regional studios scattered throughout the UK, some of which are known locally as "Broadcasting House" in imitation of the BBC's London headquarters.

BBC Services

Among its many services are domestic radio and television stations. Its wholly owned commercial subsidiaries jointly operates a number of other broadcasting services, namely the UKTV channels, some of the Discovery channels, and several other services available on satellite & cable services in the UK.

It also has many non-broadcasting ventures within the United Kingdom including book & magazine publishing (BBC Books), and multimedia production services (DVDs, CDs, computer games) provided by BBC Multimedia. These are predominantly owned and operated by BBC Worldwide Ltd and profits from which are fed back into the corporation to subsidise programme making.

The BBC has both satellite and cable broadcasting joint-ventures serving the United States, Canada, and other countries. In addition the BBC operates world broadcasting services (especially radio) in cooperation with, and some funded by, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. In 2005, the BBC announced that it would substantially reduce its radio broadcasting in Eastern European languages and divert resources instead to a new Arabic language satellite TV broadcasting station (including radio and online content) in the Middle East to be launched in 2007[2]. Also run jointly with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office is BBC Monitoring, which monitors radio, television, the press and the internet worldwide.

Before the introduction of Independent Television in 1955 and subsequently Independent Radio in 1973, it held a monopoly on broadcasting. More recent deregulation of the British television broadcasting market produced analogue cable television and satellite broadcasting and later digital satellite, digital cable and digital terrestrial television (DTT). Today the BBC broadcasts in almost all media and operates an Internet service, bbc.co.uk.

BBC News

BBC News claims to be the largest broadcast news gathering operation in the world, providing services to BBC domestic radio as well as television networks such as BBC News 24, BBC Parliament and BBC World, as well as BBCi, Ceefax and BBC News Online. New BBC News services that are also proving popular are mobile services to mobile phones and PDAs. Desktop news alerts, e-mail alerts, and digital TV alerts are also available.

Radio

The BBC has five major national stations, Radio 1 ("the best in new music"), Radio 2 (the UK's most listened to radio station, with 13.7 million weekly listeners), Radio 3 (specialist-interest music such as classical, world, arts, drama and jazz), Radio 4 (current affairs, drama and comedy), and Radio 5 Live and Radio 5 Live SportXL (24 hour news, sports and talk).

There is also a network of local stations (for example BBC Hereford and Worcester, BBC Radio Jersey and BBC London) with a mixture of talk, news and music in England and the Channel Islands as well as national stations of BBC Radio Wales, BBC Radio Cymru (in Welsh), BBC Radio Scotland, BBC Radio nan Gaidheal (in Scots Gaelic), BBC Radio Ulster, and BBC Radio Foyle.

The BBC has been at the forefront of digital radio broadcasting with Five Live Sports Extra (a companion to Five Live for additional events coverage), 1Xtra (for black, urban and gospel music), BBC 6 Music (alternative genres of music), BBC7 (Comedy, Drama & Kids shows), Asian Network (Asian talk, music and news in many Asian languages), and World Service.

For a world-wide audience, the BBC produces the Foreign Office funded BBC World Service, which is broadcast worldwide on shortwave radio, and on DAB Digital Radio in the UK. The World Service can be received in 139 capital cities worldwide and is a major source of news and information programming for over 140 million listeners worldwide. The Service currently broadcasts in 43 languages and dialects (including English), though not all languages are broadcast in all areas.[3]

Since 1943, the BBC has also provided radio programming to the British Forces Broadcasting Service, which broadcasts in countries where British troops are stationed.

All of the national BBC radio stations, as well as the BBC World Service, are available over the Internet in the RealAudio streaming format. The BBC has also recently experimented with the free, open source Ogg Vorbis streaming audio format and podcasting.

Television

BBC Television Centre in West London.

BBC One and BBC Two are the BBC's flagship television channels. The BBC is also promoting the new channels BBC Three and BBC Four, which are only available via digital television equipment (now in widespread use in the UK, with analogue transmission expected to be phased out from 2008). The BBC also runs BBC News 24, BBC Parliament, and two children's channels, CBBC and CBeebies, also on digital.

BBC One is a regionalised TV service which provides opt-outs throughout the day for local news and other local programming. In the Republic of Ireland the Northern Ireland regionalised BBC One & BBC Two are available via analogue transmissions deflecting signals from the North and also carried out on Sky Digital, NTL Ireland and Chorus

From June 9, 2006 the BBC will begin a 6-12 month trial of High-definition television broadcasts under the name BBC HD. It has been producing programmes in the format for many years, and hopes to produce 100% of new programmes in HDTV by 2010.

Since 1975, the BBC has also provided its TV programmes to the British Forces Broadcasting Service (BFBS), allowing members of HM Forces serving all over the world to watch and listen to their favourite programmes from home on two dedicated TV channels.

Worldwide

BBC Worldwide Limited is the wholly owned commercial subsidiary of the BBC responsible for the commercial exploitation of BBC programmes and other properties, including a number of television stations throughout the world. The cable and satellite stations BBC Prime (in Europe, Africa the Middle East, and Asia), BBC America, BBC Canada (alongside BBC Kids, and BBC Japan broadcast popular BBC programmes to people outside the UK, as does UK.TV (co-run with Foxtel and Fremantle Media) in Australasia. BBC Worldwide also runs a 24-hour news channel, BBC World and co-runs, with Flextech, the UKTV network of stations in the UK, producers of amongst others UKTV Gold. In addition, BBC television news appears nightly on many Public Broadcasting Service stations in the United States, as do reruns of BBC programmes from Lionheart TV, and in In New Zealand on TV ONE.

Many BBC programmes (especially documentaries) are sold via BBC Worldwide to foreign television stations, and comedy, documentaries and historical drama productions are popular on the international DVD market.

BBC Worldwide also maintains the publishing arm of the BBC and it is the third-largest publisher of consumer magazines in the United Kingdom [4]. BBC Magazines, formerly known as BBC Publications, publishes the Radio Times and a number of magazines that support BBC programming such as BBC Top Gear, BBC Good Food, BBC Sky at Night, BBC History, BBC Wildlife and BBC Music. In addition, BBC Worldwide acquired the independent magazine publisher Origin Publishing in 2004.

Internet

The bbc.co.uk [5] website, formerly BBCi and before that BBC Online, includes a comprehensive, advertisement free news website and archive. It is the UK's most-visited digital destination with over 3 million web pages and that number is rising fast every day. According to Alexa's TrafficRank system, in January 2006 bbc.co.uk was the 11th most popular English Language website in the world. (References: Global Top 500 Sites - Top English Language Sites)

The website allows the BBC to produce sections which complement the various programmes on television and radio, and it is common for viewers and listeners to be told website addresses for the bbc.co.uk sections relating to that programme. The site also allows users to listen to most Radio output live and for seven days after broadcast using its RealPlayer-based "Radio Player"; some TV content is also distributed in RealVideo format. A new system known as iMP is currently under development, which uses peer-to-peer and DRM technology to deliver both radio and TV content for offline use for up to 7 days.

An overview of the BBC Internet Services network is available here [6].

In recent years some major on-line companies and politicians have complained that the bbc.co.uk website receives too much funding from the television licence, meaning that other websites are unable to compete with the vast amount of advertising-free on-line content available on bbc.co.uk. Some have proposed that the amount of licence fee money spent on bbc.co.uk should be reduced — either being replaced with funding from advertisements or subscriptions, or a reduction in the amount of content available on the site. In response to this the BBC carried out an investigation, and has now set in motion a plan to change the way it provides its online services. bbc.co.uk will now attempt to fill in gaps in the market, but will guide users to other websites for currently existing market provision. (For example, instead of providing local events information and timetables, users will be guided to outside websites already providing that information.) Part of this plan included the BBC closing some of its websites, and rediverting money to redevelop other parts.

Interactive

BBCi is the brand name for the BBC's interactive digital television services, which are available through Freeview (digital terrestrial), as well as Sky Digital (satellite) and (cable) NTL and Telewest. Unlike Ceefax, BBCi is able to display full-colour graphics, photographs, and video, as well as educational programs. Recent examples include the interactive sports coverage for football and rugby football matches, BBC Soundbites which starred young actress Jennifer Lynn and an interactive national IQ test. All of the BBC's digital television stations, (and radio stations on Freeview), allow access to the BBCi service.

BBCi provides viewers with over 120 interactive TV programmes every year, as well as the 24/7 service. It also has video weather and news.

Unions at the BBC

Union membership is a private matter between staff and their chosen union, staff are not automatically covered by a union, but since the BBC is a large employer (in the media sector), membership numbers are considerable.

Staff at the BBC are normally represented by BECTU, along with journalistic staff by the NUJ and electrical staff by Amicus. Union membership is optional, and paid for by staff members and not by the BBC.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

1. Briggs, Asa. - The BBC - The First Fifty Years - Condensed version of the five-volume history by the same author. - Oxford University Press, 1985. ISBN 0-19-212971-6
2. Coulton, Barbara. - Louis MacNeice in the BBC - Writer and producer from 1941 to 1961 in the Features Department of BBC radio. - Faber and Faber, 1980. ISBN 0-571-11537-3
3. Gilder PhD., Eric. - Mass Media Moments in the United Kingdom, the USSR and the USA. - Historical background relating to the British Broadcasting Company, Ltd., its founding companies; their transatlantic connections; General Post Office licensing system; commercial competitors from Europe prior to World War II and offshore during the 1960s. - "Lucian Blaga" University of Sibiu Press, Romania. 2003. ISBN 973-651-596-6
4. Milne, Alasdair. - The memoirs of a British broadcaster - History of the Zircon spy satellite affair, written by a former Director General of the BBC. A series of BBC radio programmes called "The Secret Society" led to a raid by police in both England and Scotland to seize documents as part of a government censorship campaign. - Coronet, 1989. - ISBN 0-34-049750-5
5. Moran, Lord. - Churchill at War 1940 to 1945 - The Memoirs of Churchill's Doctor, with an introduction by Lord Moran's son, John, the present Lord Moran. - This diary paints an intimate portrait of Churchill by Sir Charles Watson, his personal physician (Lord Moran), who spent the war years with the Prime Minister. In his diary, Moran recorded insights into Churchill's character, and moments when he let his guard down, including his views about the BBC being riddled with communists. - Carroll & Graf, 2002. Reissue ISBN 0-78-671041-1
6. Parker, Derek. - David & Charles - Radio: The Great Years - History of BBC radio programmes from the beginning until the date of publication. 1977. ISBN 0-7153-7430-3
7. Spangenberg, Jochen. - The BBC in Transition. Reasons, Results and Consequences - Encompassing account of the BBC and influencing external factors until 1996. - Deutscher Universitaetsverlag. 1997. ISBN 3-8244-4227-2
8. Wilson, H.H. - Pressure Group - History of the political fight to introduce commercial television into the United Kingdom. - Rutgers University Press, 1961.
9. West, W.J. - Truth Betrayed a critical assessment of the BBC, London, 1987, ISBN 0-7156-2182-3

External links

BBC web pages

• bbc.co.uk: BBC Homepage
• bbc.co.uk: About the BBC
• BBC Editorial Guidelines
• News: BBC News
• BBC Motion Gallery
• BBC Press Office - Broadcasting House
• BBC Programme Catalogue - "Details of 949,181 BBC radio & TV programmes, dating back 75 years"
• BBC Test the Nation
• bbctraining.com: BBC Training & Development - training for the broadcast industry
• History of the BBC - Broadcasting House
• Copy of Royal Charter 1
• Morris Telford's Blog – BBC Shropshire

Articles from news websites

• Evolution of bbc broadcasting languages
• Sunday Herald: The BBC's war ... caught in crossfire (Mark Damazer, Deputy Director, BBC News) — 13 April 2003
• Wired: BBC to Open Content Floodgates BBC's Creative Archive project — 16 June 2004
• Media Guardian: BBC renews conflict of interest guide for staff — 11 July 2002
• Media Guardian: Tories go to war over 'leftie' BBC — 27 February 2005
• The Independent: Blair tells Murdoch: 'gloating' BBC is 'full of hatred for America' — 18 September 2005

Personal sites

• Broadcasting House - a potted history
• Broadcasting House in 1932
• Historical Television Website: This is the BBC
• TV Ark - The British Television Museum
• Essay examining the reasons for and against the licence fee
• The TV Room
• An article on the creation of the original BBC logo.

Credits

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