Streaming Public Service Television in the Age of Platforms: Lessons for the UK from a comparative analysis of VoD publishing and personalisation in seven markets
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent years have brought a number of new challenges for public service media (PSM) all over the world. These include radical changes in media use, the emergence of streaming services and the dominance of big tech. These new competitors for the attention of audiences have challenged PSM as an institution and project, requiring public service broadcasters to transform into fully digital, online-first organisations. In recent years, the UK’s three largest public service broadcasters (BBC, ITV and Channel 4) have made their video-on-demand (VoD) services central to their content and distribution strategies and, in turn, media regulation has been required to keep pace. The passing of the Media Act 2024 brings all the UK broadcaster VoD services under the public service remit for the first time. It also introduces prominence legislation, requiring appropriate prominence of PSM content and services in connected devices and requiring public service remit content to be readily discoverable within the PSM’s VoD. In this context, we present results from research conducted during the second year of PSM-AP, a large-scale comparative research project analysing ‘Public Service Media in the Age of Platforms’. For this research we compared the user interfaces of PSM VoD services in seven markets: Belgium (Flanders and Wallonia), Canada, Denmark, Italy, Poland and the UK. Our analysis focused on the publishing and personalisation practices evident in these services. This brief presents core findings from the UK analysis of VoDs. It also proposes recommendations to aid with the future health of PSM, so that PSMs might best navigate the challenges associated with the platform age and public service values might be extended into the digital-first era.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".