Following a public consultation, the BBC Board has approved the Policy for the distribution of the BBC’s UK Public Services.
Effective distribution - essentially how the BBC gets its content and services to audiences - is vitally important for the BBC and its ongoing ability to inform, educate and entertain.
In February 2018 the BBC opened a public consultation seeking on its proposed Distribution Policy. The Policy set out seven conditions to govern the way the BBC distributes its services and content on third party distribution platforms:
- Prominence - the placement of BBC content and services relative to those of other providers should be in line with audience needs and expectations
- Editorial Control - the BBC should retain editorial control of its content and its placement
- Branding & Attribution - s should be able to easily identify which content on a platform is provided by the BBC
- Quality - s should be able to enjoy a high quality experience of BBC content and services
- Data - the BBC should have access to data about the usage of its services
- Free Access - s should incur no incremental cost to access BBC content and services
- Value for Money - BBC distribution arrangements should maximise cost-effectiveness of distribution to the licence fee payer
The BBC received 26 responses to the consultation from a range of organisations including other broadcasters, producers, the device manufacturing sector and audience and accessibility groups. Having considered those responses, the BBC has made a number of refinements to the policy. The BBC is also publishing guidance on the BBC’s processes for dealing with requests for carriage of its content and services.
The final Policy and the Guidance document can be found here.
We have also published a summary of the comments we received in the consultation, our response to those comments, and the amendments we have made to the Policy as a result which can be found below.
Organisational responses to the consultation, where permission has been given, have also been published below.