The BBC is making moves. Over two decades after it first hit the internet, YouTube has blossomed into an extremely powerful and influential platform. The Web’s second-most-visited website (second only to its proprietor, Google) has launched the careers of once-amateur film critics and filmmakers, and just about every media company in the Free World makes extensive use of it to showcase and announce its content. The BBC currently uses the site for promotional purposes and news media, but now the British Broadcasting Corporation is taking a watershed step forward in regard to its YouTube presence.
A Deal for Fresh Content
A January 21 article on the BBC’s official website announced that the broadcaster has entered into a new agreement with YouTube. The company has maintained several YouTube channels since the site’s inaugural year of 2005, and uses these to post movie/TV show adverts, clips, and news videos. Per this new deal, on the other hand, it will begin producing original media specifically for YouTube. This media will include documentaries, narrative films and shows, and channels specializing in sports, news, and children’s content. The broadcaster already has such categorized sub-channels in addition to its primary channel, but this deal will cause the company to expand its YouTube presence to as many as 50 channels.
What This Means Businesswise
Several of the British Broadcasting Corporation’s YouTube channels are already immensely popular, including its main channel (over 15 million subscribers), BBC News (about 19.1 million), and BBC Earth, which specializes in posting clips from its many nature documentaries (14.3 million). By offering films, shows, and other media geared specifically towards the YouTube crowd, the broadcaster stands to greatly increase the volume of this success.
The January 21 BBC article contains a quote from Tim Davie, the director-general of the British Broadcasting Corporation, who explains that, “importantly, this partnership also allows new audiences different routes into their services.” Davie cited the broadcaster’s video-on-demand service, BBC iPlayer, and its audio streaming/download service, BBC Sounds, as two such routes.
The BBC also stands to derive monetary profit from this YouTube deal – albeit not within the United Kingdom. Because it is publicly funded in the UK via a licensing fee, the BBC cannot earn advertising revenue within its native country; this regulation is intended to ensure that commercial considerations don’t negatively influence its media, and it will also apply to YouTube monetization. Fortunately for the broadcaster’s business, it doesn’t apply in either case to operations in foreign countries.
A New Deal for the Modern World
20 years after YouTube and other social-media platforms first appeared, their hold on today’s consumers of media has come to rival – and probably surpass – that of the more traditional medium of television. It’s almost surprising that the BBC’s groundbreaking agreement with YouTube didn’t come a lot sooner. Now that it’s here, the British Broadcasting Corporation, which is now in the final year before its centennial anniversary, will enter an era of greater complexity – but also, probably, of even greater profit.
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