Is it making smart commercial investments for the future on our behalf or indulging corporate vanity?The case for the BBC exploiting its content and mental property on behalf of licence payers who funded it is a hard one to argue with. Investing in ways – and novel digital ways – of doing that in terms of programme sales and merchandising is probably the fair thing to accomplish.
It might also be fair to establish BBC branded channels around the world as a way of maximising those returns to licence payers and to build the BBC’s (and Britain’s) global presence. And it might also be fair to produce programmes abroad to feed those channels and maximise returns from BBC formats sold separately to overseas broadcasters by producing them rather than simply selling the rights. whether the BBC has a commercial subsidiary to conduct this commerce on its behalf,then for reasons of strategic coherence and to protect the BBC’s global reputation, it needs to be closely aligned with the BBC’s principal public service UK core operations. That all means that any argument to privatise BBC Worldwide – as is canvassed in the government’s charter review green paper – would take some winning.
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Source: theguardian.com