BBC Trust confirms local video refusal

The BBC Trust on its website today confirms that it has refused permission for the BBC's £68 million plan to expand local video on its regional websites after concluding its public value test into the proposals.
The proposal provoked fierce opposition from the regional press which has its own plans to develop local websites at a time when its circulation and advertising revenues are under threat from the internet.
In its announcement today, The Trust says its "final decision follows a public consultation on its provisional conclusions, published in November, to reject local video because it would not improve services for the public enough to justify either the investment of licence fee funds or the negative impact on commercial media."
Diane Coyle, BBC Trustee and chairman of the Strategic Approvals Committee, said: "The Trust is committed to improving regional and local services from the BBC for licence fee payers but a broadband-only local video news proposal is unlikely to achieve what they want.
"Instead, we believe the BBC's priority should be improving the quality of existing regional services. We recognise that the ways of achieving this may vary in different parts of the UK. We have asked the Executive to come back to us with new proposals later this year which will then be fully scrutinised by the Trust."
The Executive has outlined its emerging thinking in a submission to the Trust which is published today. Funds totalling £68 million that would have covered the four-year period from the launch of local video have been ring fenced pending any new proposals, subject to Trust approval.

'It was the public wot won it,' says BBC trustee

So it wasn't the frantic lobbying by the Newspaper Society and the likes of Trinity Mirror chief Sly Bailey that influenced the BBC Trust to block plans to beef up the BBC's websites with video reports. It was the public.
In a letter to MediaGuardian today, Diane Coyle, BBC trustee and chair of the Public Value and Fair Trading Committee, disputes claims made last week by Bectu's Mark Scrimshaw that the BBC Trust was "beholden to commercial interests".
She says of the decision to instruct BBC management to drop plans for a broadband local video service: "The major reason for our decision was the evidence that such a service would not meet the demand for better local news. The public mainly want this news on radio and TV, not via the internet, and we have asked BBC management to bring forward new proposals to meet that demand. In reaching our decision we, of course, took account of representations from existing local media providers, and gave them appropriate weight - as the BBC Charter instructs us to do - but it was the views of the public that carried the day."

Bectu blast for Guardian and BBC Trust

Mark Scrimshaw, chair of broadcasting union Bectu's BBC Division, gives the BBC Trust and The Guardian both barrels today over the Trust's decision to block BBC plans to beef up its local websites with video reports.
Scimshaw, in a letter published in MediaGuardian, claims the Trust "has shown itself to be craven and pusillanimous, more beholden to commercial interests than any idea of public service broadcasting." He doesn't spare The Guardian, arguing it should have declared an interest in its coverage of the story because it is part of Guardian Media Group which owns a string of local papers, including the Manchester Evening News. Scrimshaw adds: "It (The Guardian) represents one of the main players to gain from the lack of competition thus created, and will be able to continue to get away with lamentable quality and exploitative wages and conditions...The losers from all this are staff in English Regions particularly, who will now face swathes of redundancies; and viewers, who will have to put up with the pitiful offerings of local newspapers' online video rather than a BBC alternative."