Review advises BBC to replace old formats with fresh ideas

Streaming services such as Netflix identified as key challenge facing the corporation

The BBC could “retire old formats” with an internal review at the corporation recommending slots be freed up for new ideas, a report by the public spending watchdog has said.

The National Audit Office (NAO) said the review of the tendering process for programmes “recommended retiring more shows where this made sense from an audience point of view”.

Meanwhile, the NAO said the corporation faced a “number of important challenges and risks”, highlighting the success of streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime as evidence that audiences were increasingly accessing content digitally.

According to the report, the BBC could lose the ability to make programmes in a certain genre should its commercial operation, BBC Studios, be unsuccessful in commissions too frequently.

The BBC Studios division was set up in April 2017 and competes with independent companies for tenders to create programmes, such as A Question Of Sport, Holby City, Doctors, and Songs Of Praise.

It said: “In addition to losing programmes in open competition, Studios could also lose work if BBC PSB (public service broadcasting) decides to retire old formats.

“The likelihood of this happening increased in November 2017 when an internal PSB review of the tendering process for recommissioning existing programmes recommended retiring more shows, where this made sense from an audience point of view, in order to free up slots for new ideas.”

The BBC’S commercial wing generated revenue of £1.2 billion in 2016-17 for the corporation – a figure considered to be “broadly stable” – while only one of its subsidiaries has made profit throughout the last five years.

The financial watchdog said the BBC had to strike the right balance when developing new programming and formats, stating: “It will need to manage risk carefully to ensure that the funds it invests in such projects have the greatest impact possible in a crowded marketplace.”

NAO head Sir Amyas Morse said: “The BBC’S expanding commercial activities are undertaken on behalf of licence fee payers and exploit the significant assets that licence fee payers have paid for. The public interest in holding the BBC to account for these activities is therefore clear. Granting the NAO access to the commercial subsidiaries for the first time is an important step in improving the transparency of the BBC’S operations.”

The National Audit Office lauded the BBC for giving it access to the commercial subsidiaries for the first time.