The BBC must plan for a future where a large proportion of its audience never watch its traditional television channels, its director general will say, as he calls for the iPlayer catch-up service to become a rival to Netflix.
Tony Hall will say that while iPlayer was pioneering when it launched a decade ago, excessive regulation and competition from US streaming services meant it had since lost its advantage.
“While our audiences love the quality and brilliance of our content, they now want and expect more than just catch up,” he is expected to say.
Hall will tell an audience of senior television executives that the iPlayer lies at the heart of the BBC’s strategy, with proposals for more titles, box sets and programmes to be available for at least 12 months after broadcast instead of just a month. He will also call for more live programmes and archive material.
His proposals come as projections from Enders Analysis suggest traditional television channels will account for less than 50% of video viewing in the UK by 2026.
The analysts predict traditional channels such as BBC One and ITV will become the preserve of older viewers who are used to watching shows at a fixed time, with younger consumers switching to on-demand viewing and services such as YouTube.
They suggest all is not lost for the UK’s traditional broadcasters, which account for nearly 80% of all video viewing across the UK population. In comparison, Netflix and Amazon combined account for about 7%, though they are growing fast.
It is almost a year since the BBC revealed that young people were spending more time watching Netflix than all of its BBC TV services each week, and increasingly listening to music on streaming services such as Spotify rather than BBC radio stations.
In an attempt to remain relevant, Hall is to call for a new contract for BBC audiences, who pay the licence fee of £154.40 a year for its broadcast and catch-up services. The corporation faces a battle to convince younger audiences that it is worth paying substantially more on a monthly basis than video-only rivals such as Netflix in return for a wide range of entertainment, audio, and current affairs programming.
The BBC director general will attempt to emphasise the scale of the challenge as the BBC juggles this transition with running its existing outlets.
Hall said: “It might be five years away, it might be 10, but soon our digital services will be the only ones some of our audiences use … Not long ago, traditional broadcasters and media organisations could each do our thing and expect audiences to make time to come to us. Now we must fit around their lives. Deliver value directly to them. Or we all risk irrelevance.”
