Revenue 2023: £5.725 billion (€6.582 billion)

Overview

The British Broadcasting Corporation, founded in 1927 and self-described as "the world's leading public broadcaster", produces a radio and television program within Great Britain that is financed exclusively by license fees. Abroad, BBC Commercial Holdings (formerly BBC Worldwide) generates additional income through additional TV channels and the licensing of television formats, among other things. 

General Information

Headquarters
Broadcasting House
Portlands Place
London W1A 1AA
Great Britain
Telephone 0044 20 7580 4468
Website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc 

Branches of trade: TV stations, radio, rights trading, TV production, TV specialty channels
legal form: Public institution 
Financial year: 01.04. – 31.03.
Founding year: 1927 

Economic baseline data (in million £)

	2023	2022	2021	2020	2019	2018
Revenue	5.725	5.330	5.064	4.943	4.889	5.062
Employees	21.273	21.252	22.219	24.679	22.401	21.413

Executives and Directors

Executive Committee:

• Tim Davie, Director-General
• Kerris Bright, Chief Customer Officer
• Tom Fussell, CEO BBC Studios
• Charlotte Moore, Chief Content Officer
• Gautam Rangarajan, Group Director of Strategy and Performance
• Rhodri Talfan Davies, Director, Nations
• Leigh Tavaziva, Chief Operating Officer
• Deborah Turness, CEO, BBC News and Current Affairs

BBC Board:

• Richard Sharp, Chairman
• Tim Davie, Director-General
• Shumeet Banerji, Non-executive Director
• Damon Buffini, non-executive director; Chair, Commercial Board
• Elan Closs Stephens, Member for Wales
• Shirley Garrood, Non-Executive Director
• Robbie Gibb, Member for England
• Muriel Gray, Non-executive Director, Member for Scotland
• Ian Hargreaves, Non-executive Director
• Charlotte Moore, Chief Content Officer
• Nicholas Serota, Senior Independent Director
• Leigh Tavaziva, Chief Operating Officer
• Deborah Turness, CEO, BBC News and Current Affairs

History

In 1922, British Broadcasting Company, as it was first called, was founded by British and American electrical equipment manufacturers as a joint-stock company to increase sales of their radio receivers. The British postal authority granted the BBC an exclusive broadcasting license to prevent a chaotic situation like that of the then unregulated US radio. After the BBC's social importance became clear but its business model failed, it was converted into a state-owned corporation in 1926. In January 1927 it was renamed British Broadcasting. CorporationAt the same time, the new BBC received its first "Royal Charter", which made it, like the Bank of England, a state institution outside the sphere of influence of the government, but not of Parliament. Financed exclusively through a so-called "licence fee", independent public broadcasting was born. The core of the BBC's programming mandate to this day is to "serve the public interest" through information, education and entertainment. 

Initially limited to radio, the BBC began regular television broadcasts in 1946, and in 1952 the new medium made its first breakthrough with the international live broadcast of the coronation of Elizabeth II. As early as 1955, the BBC television program faced commercial competition with the introduction of the advertising-financed, regionally organized ITV channels (Independent Television). In the mid-1960s, the BBC was granted another program, BBC 2. Since the early 1980s, there has also been another private channel, Channel Four (public service, but financed by advertising). And since the move to digital television in the mid-1990s, the BBC has been systematically expanding its program offering. All of the BBC's commercial activities - national and international - were combined in the subsidiary BBC Worldwide in 1994 (renamed BBC Studios in April 2018). 

The fee adjustment to £151.50 by 2012, decided in 2007, was initially seen as a break with tradition. Since 1988, the "licence fee" set by the government and the House of Commons had been linked to the rate of inflation. This indexation was now a thing of the past and there were isolated strikes. The BBC's Director General stressed that the funding gap could have consequences for the program and announced an in-house inventory to find ways to save money. The BBC came under further pressure with the "Digital Britain Reports" published in June 2009: the BBC was required to hand over 3.5 percent of the license fee to its commercial rivals from 2013 in order to help finance their "public service" offerings. Internally, the institution committed to a savings program called "Delivering Creative Future" in 2006 and was able to achieve savings of two billion pounds by 2013, including by cutting 1,500 jobs and selling the BBC Television Center in London. In 2011, the company then moved to the traditional London Broadcasting House and to MediaCityUK in Salford (in the Manchester area). 

Due to the economic crisis, the government decided in October 2011 to freeze the licence fee at the 2010 level (£145.50). This new "Licence Fee Settlement" ran until 2017. Further savings were to be achieved through, among other things, salary cuts (particularly among management, after excessive severance payments to 150 BBC managers were revealed in the summer of 2013) and increased resource efficiency (in 2012 alone, 875 BBC employees' laptops were misplaced or stolen - resulting in costs of £255,000, which the licence fee payers had to cover). 

The Jimmy Savile abuse scandal also came to light in 2011. The police had been investigating him for paedophilia since 1961, but were unable to prove anything. After his death, especially after an ITV report in October 2012, more and more victims of abuse came forward, 80 percent of them female and underage at the time of the crimes. A massive scandal arose; according to Scotland Yard, Savile was "the worst sex offender in the country's history". This led to two investigations into the role of the BBC. It became clear that serious mistakes had been made right at the beginning, during the internal investigation, and that, for example, a critical Savile obituary had been prevented from being broadcast at the end of 2011. The BBC's then Director General George Entwistle had to resign two months after taking office in September 2012. It emerged that a former top politician had been wrongly suspected of child abuse in a BBC broadcast, while Savile was apparently committing abuse on BBC premises. In February 2016, the results of the second report followed: BBC officials had "systematically turned a blind eye". An "atmosphere of fear" and a "sexist macho culture" had prevailed at the BBC. 

The BBC also came under increasing pressure to streamline its bloated organisational structure and reform its supervisory methods. The government also took the scandals and waste of money (for example: 100 million pounds were lost through a failed digital project) as an opportunity to draw up reform plans in 2016. The old aunt (“Auntie Beeb”, as the British also say) was to be rejuvenated, made more efficient and more transparent. Following an amendment to the “Royal Charter” in 2017, the names of all employees earning an annual income of 450,000 pounds (equivalent to 570,000 euros) or more were published and the media and telecommunications regulator Ofcom was the first external regulator of the institution.

Another opportunity to relieve the burden on British license fee payers and thus also calm the public debate was discussed in spring 2021: a possible merger with Channel 4, the public broadcaster that was established as an alternative to BBC1 and BBC2 (as well as the private broadcaster ITV) and is financed not by license fees but only by advertising revenue. Instead of the repeatedly mentioned privatization of Channel 4, a merger with the BBC could save around a billion pounds per year.

management

Tim Davie has been the new Director General of the BBC since September 2020. His predecessor, Tony Hall, Baron Hall of Birkenhead, born in 1951, in office since 2013 as successor to the resigned George Entwistle (see above), surprisingly announced in January that he wanted to step down in the summer of 2020. The reason: A new person at the top of the broadcaster should lead the negotiations on the review (2022) and, in particular, the renewal (2027) of the "Royal Charter".

Now Tim Davie, born in 1967, has been with the public broadcaster BBC for 15 years. Before that, he was Vice President of Marketing and Franchise at the drinks company PepsiCo. Davie joined the BBC in April 2005, initially as Director of Marketing, Communications & Audiences. In September 2008, he took over the Audio & Music division and with it the national BBC radio programs. In December 2012, Davie became head of BBC Worldwide.

Sir David Clementi, BBC Chairman, believes Tim Davie is the right person to lead the BBC through further reforms and changes - as CEO and Editor-in-Chief responsible for editorial and operational leadership. Davie himself said he felt honoured and spoke of a "critical time" for Britain in light of the Corona pandemic, which had shown how much people care about the BBC: "Our mission has never been more relevant and necessary than it is today."

Business segments

UK public services:

television station BBC One and Two (with regional windows for Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales), BBC Three (online only), BBC Four (culture/education), CBBC (children), Cbeebies (toddlers), BBC News, BBC Parliament (live broadcasts from Westminster).
Radio: Radio 1 (pop, youth), Radio 2 (general entertainment), Radio 3 (serious music, culture), Radio 4 (entertainment, news, radio plays), Radio 5 Live (news, sport), plus regional radio programs for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The BBC operates five radio channels exclusively using digital broadcasting technology: Radio 1Xtra (current music), Radio 4 Extra (comedy, radio plays, children's programs), Radio 5 Live Sports Extra (more commentary than its sister station), Radio 6 Music (alternative and "indie" music) and the Asian Network, which is aimed at migrants and broadcasts mainly in English, but also in various languages from India and neighboring areas.
Digital Services: In addition to the BBC homepage, BBC Weather and BBC News, among others, the BBC iPlayer (a BBC media library) is available online.

All BBC TV and radio programs are advert-free and are funded by the licence fee, which in the UK is paid exclusively by TV viewers. Radio programs can be received free of charge.

Global news services:

BBC World Service broadcasts on television/radio/online in over 40 languages and reaches around 280 million listeners around the world every week and is financed through the licence fee.

BBC World News and BBC.com. The television channel can be received in over 200 countries, in 300 million households and 1.8 million hotel rooms.


Commercial services:

BBC Studios (until 2018 BBC Worldwide) is the commercial arm of the BBC Group with a total turnover of around £1.4 billion and is responsible for the financing, development, production and distribution of program content and spin-offs such as magazines, books, etc. All profits are returned to the BBC parent company.

BBC Studioworks is the UK's largest provider of studio and post-production capacity at the Elstree Studios in North London (opened in 1914) and, since 2017, at the Television Centre in the west of the city.

Current developments

The BBC is under what is probably the greatest media policy pressure in its history. Right-wing British politicians in particular are repeatedly calling for the institution to be broken up. As the then Conservative Home Secretary Priti Patel announced in June 2021, an amendment to the BBC Charter should lead to a comprehensive restructuring. One conceivable option would be the installation of an external review board that controls all content - this would de facto mean that the BBC would lose its editorial independence. 

Different, but also revolutionary, is what BBC Director General Tim Davie said in early December 2022: "Imagine a world where there is only the internet, where TV and radio are switched off and the choice is unlimited. This switch to digital technology, this shutdown of broadcasting will happen, and we should actively prepare for this development." One challenge, however, is how to reach the millions of Britons who, for example, live in rural areas, do not have a strong internet connection and would be cut off from a purely online BBC.

Almost all BBC channels are experiencing a long-term decline in live audiences. Davie has already announced plans to convert CBBC and BBC Four into online-only channels, and other channels are likely to follow suit in the coming years. Traditional TV audiences are still high among older viewers, with the average BBC One viewer being over 60. Younger viewers are drifting away.

literature

• Higgins, Charlotte: This New Noise: The Extraordinary Birth and Troubled Life of the BBC. Guardian Faber Publishing, 2015