Ex. 1. Identifying aspects of communication. Read the following speech and get ready to dwell on the main elements of the communicative episode under consideration.

Capturing the Digital Opportunity for the Whole UK

Speech given in Manchester Business School’s 2008

Vital Topics Lecture Series

By C. Thomson, Chief Operating Officer, BBC

June 5, 2008

Thank you for inviting me to give this lecture; it really is an honour.

I see that this year’s Vital Topics have already ranged from the credit crunch to the global reach of Manchester United. I have to tell you: the most vital business topic for the BBC at the moment is quite different and if anything even more serious.

 What we’re all biting our nails over is who Sir Alan’s going to hire as his next apprentice: Alex, Clare, Helène or Lee.

 What’s so interesting about the latest series of The Apprentice is not just that it’s been pulling in large audiences on BBC One, but that it’s being doing the same for the iPlayer.

 Along with a resurgent Doctor Who, Sir Alan’s been dominating the 20 most-requested programmes, helping propel iPlayer traffic to nearly a million requests a day. You’ll appreciate that getting a service like iPlayer off the ground hasn’t been easy.

On the 1st of April we had to use some particularly novel marketing tactics, using a video I’d like to play for you now. [Penguins VT]

 Light-hearted I know, but this is a great example of well-aimed short-form content really punching through and driving new media.

 In its first seven days alone, this little film had nearly two million viewings on YouTube, and just under half-a-million on iPlayer. Thanks to TV coverage, over a quarter of UK adults are now thought to have seen it at least once.

How many of them now think Penguins fly and migrate to the tropics is an open question. I’d hazard a guess it’s a good deal fewer than those who thought spaghetti grew on trees in 1957 when we put out a similar April fool – not that many in this audience will remember that!

 There may be a lesson here somewhere about levels of trust; who knows.

 The iPlayer is one of the most obvious embodiments of all the changes that are underway to create a BBC fit for the 21 st century – the topic I’ve been asked to address in this lecture.

 But if technology is central to the challenges we face it’s not in itself the real issue – the issue is how audiences respond to technological changes and how we respond to audiences.

 So, tonight I’d like to give you the bigger picture. To focus more on the whole future shape of public service broadcasting, in the context of Ofcom’s current review of the sector.

I know it’s often said we live in an ‘age of transition’. Listen to the pundits and we seem perpetually to be in one.  

I have a colleague who jokes that, when Adam and Eve left the Garden of Eden, Adam must have turned to Eve and said: “Eve, we live in an age of transition.”

And we’ve been living in one ever since it seems.

And so my apologies in advance for telling you about yet another transition – though there’s nothing hackneyed about this one.

There’s something special about the combination of forces at work in modern broadcasting, and it’s making for really profound and disruptive change.

The forces we face are, of course, common to many industries: globalisation, digitisation, market fragmentation, the erosion of old regulatory privileges.

All require more agile, efficient and partnered approaches in future.

Certainly, all of them disrupt the current system of public service broadcasting in the UK, and form the backdrop to Ofcom’s current review of our sector.

Challenges ahead

Capturing the digital opportunity, while securing reach and impact for high quality programming, is now the defining challenge of public service broadcasting.

Audiences, liberated from the old world of narrow choice, have become harder to define and to serve.

Whether finding the right tone of voice; investing in the right platforms; or extracting the full benefit of new technology – the variables at the heart of broadcasting have become more complex and risky.

 Commercial broadcasters are being tested on multiple fronts.

 The weakening of television advertising is one, with the research firm Enders predicting that 2008 will be the year in which online advertising revenues overtake those from television.

 Achieving success online is another test, amid competition far greater and entry barriers far lower than those which shaped UK broadcasting, resulting in fragmented, harder-to-capture revenue streams.

 At the same time, broadcasters are seeing diminishing value from the scarce spectrum to which they had privileged access – with nearly 90% of homes in the UK now having access to at least 40 digital TV channels.

 Outside London, retrenchment driven by commercial pressures threatens to take the broadcasting industry in many UK cities below critical mass.

 A troubled economic climate adds further pressure. Being on an essentially fixed income, the BBC now faces cost pressures that we have no means of passing on.

 Efficiency-taking has therefore had, for us, to become a way of life.  <…>

 Globalisation

 Behind many of the developments causing such profound change in our society – whether in industries like broadcasting or in whole communities like Manchester – is the influence of globalisation.

 For the BBC, globalisation means making new efforts to ensure that our programmes can continue to attract audiences in the face of well-funded international content and an ever-widening choice on the internet.

 While national approaches will, I hope, always loom large in broadcasting, best-in-class international content will increasingly – as in other industries – set quality expectations that extend across borders.

 Many leading UK programmes now take their benchmarks for quality and innovation as much from the best international output as from rival domestic programmes.

 As anyone who’s watched Heroes or one of a dozen other American shows will know, the complacent view once common in Britain – that America may be able to do the explosions and the glamour, but can never match the quality of our writing – is now no longer so obvious.

 In our case the impact of globalisation is exacerbated by convergence. The very name AOL Time Warner indicates how barriers between television, cinema, print and online have broken down.

 Producing best-in-class output will increasingly require taking risks that earn global rewards.

 Even at the BBC, we now often find ourselves of minimum scale to make content that rivals the world’s best – dwarfed as we now are by the giants of global entertainment.

 Making a landmark natural history series like Planet Earth for the UK alone has been uneconomic for nearly 30 years. While many programme areas have yet to reach this point, there are powerful reasons to suggest that many soon will.

 The growth of new media, and in particular the internet, adds a new and similarly global influence on the BBC’s output.

 Among the many effects of more global and more digital media is that the spur to quality and innovation is now – as it is in almost every industry – drawn from far broader terrain.

 Ofcom, in its current review of PSB, is rightly concerned that the spur to quality and innovation be maintained.

 In the old era of limited choice, of course, a principal spur to innovation and quality among UK broadcasters was the output of other UK broadcasters we all kept each other honest. While elements of this influence, if weaker, will remain, the spur to innovation and quality today is increasingly cross-platform and cross-border.

 Beyond plurality

 Related to this evolution in plurality is the fact that, contrary to much received wisdom, the public’s capacity to engage with and digest a rich diet of content has being going up, not down.

 And so you get Five making best-in-class documentaries like Paul Merton in China or Children’s output like Milkshake; or Sky’s arts output or Ross Kemp in Afghanistan – not because they must, but because they’re responding to a genuine demand for a richer mix of high quality content. The BBC does, and will continue to, play a powerful role in helping stimulate this development.

 When we do our job properly and produce high-quality and original UK content ourselves, we are setting the benchmark, conditioning the market – that is, feeding audience expectations for this class of content and thereby incentivising others to provide it as well.

 Clearly we’re not the only ones driving this trend, for so too are the deeper drivers I’ve described, like globalisation and the public’s growing appetite for thought-provoking content.

 Of course, there will be areas of public service output that remain uneconomic for anyone but the BBC to provide. But one can’t rush to the easy conclusion that these areas – absent competition – will want for quality.

 An open, creative culture at the BBC has been able to maintain high quality in areas that lack much direct competition – whether Radio 4, Radio 3, natural history, or whole areas of older Children’s content.

 I certainly do not take from this that plurality isn’t important. Just that it is one consideration amongst many and ought not, therefore, to crowd out other important considerations like efficiency, quality, range, reach, impact, and making the most of new technology and new media. <…>

Way forward

<…> We must take account of some ineluctable forces that need to be worked with, rather than against, if a new and sustainable approach is to be achieved.

I would suggest that there are two particular areas around which a strong, secure future for public service broadcasting can be achieved.

The first is a refocused BBC, resourced to condition the market around high-quality and original UK content; the second a sustainable and strategic regulatory settlement.

As for my fist point, the BBC’s role, we certainly cannot be complacent and unchanging. Rather we need a more efficient, re-focused BBC. A BBC that takes important and sometimes painful changes to meet its purposes. And a BBC that shares some of its advantages in a new spirit of partnership and collaboration.

The BBC’s current efforts to re-focus and respond to changing audience expectations include:

• Investing and focusing on quality and distinctiveness – and not quantity and replication

• Embracing new media to transform how content is made and made available, and also to change the nature of that content itself and how audiences interact with it

• Developing new relationships with audiences – creating more space for participation, feedback and involvement to produce a more open BBC

• Creating new relationships with other content and service providers – finding new ways of leading audiences not just to BBC content but also to interesting and stimulating material from others. <…>

Strategic regulation

If a strong, partnering BBC is an important part of securing the future of public service broadcasting, so too is a strategic regulatory settlement for the sector.

Such a settlement should aim for a mix of institutions, with different funding sources, ownership structures and editorial approaches. Each with a role to play in the future of UK broadcasting, although with obligations adjusted to reflect new market realities. <…>

Moreover, the new settlement should be one in which commercial broadcasters can make flexible decisions in response to the forces at work on their industry.

For only then can they earn the returns that will allow them to invest in capturing the digital opportunity.

 Only then can they meet the higher quality expectations set by global competition.

 Only then can they make a sustainable contribution to the UK creative economy.

 And only then can they maintain their healthy pressure on the BBC.

 Conclusion

 Public service broadcasting is rapidly approaching a juncture.

 One direction leads to a more complex public service broadcasting sector, with finely inter-woven structures and regulation; with public subsidies here and there. Potentially even the special relationship between the public’s money and the BBC severed.

 The other, a place where Britain continues to lead the world in broadcasting. A place where the BBC is not master of all it surveys – but strives to lift up the entire sector with it.

 Thank you.

http://www.bbc.co.uk

1. Can the topic of the speech be interesting for a vast audience or is the speech aimed at a very particular group of people?

2. How is the speech structured? Why has the speaker chosen this way of arranging the speech?

3. What arguments does the speaker provide in support of their opinion? Are they persuasive?

4. Find examples of figurative language and analyse them.

Ex. 2. Discussion. Express your opinion about the following. A formal event should predetermine a very rigid speech structure. Is it so in the case under consideration? Prove your point.

Ex. 3. Follow-up. Analyse the speech in terms of information processing and listening. Dwell on the following items: attention (voluntary and involuntary), interpretation (comprehension and acceptance), retention and retrieval.