Strategy, Positioning and Projection in Digital Television: Channel Four and the Commercialization of Public Service Broadcasting in the UK

Abstract

This article examines the digital televison and interactive strategies of one of Britain’s leading public service broadcasters, Channel Four. They form part of a wider shift in Channel Four’s identity: from a television channel to a cross-platform media company positioned to exploit technological convergence and the expanding media economy. The wider context is one of multiple uncertainties, technological, economic, regulatory and cultural. Channel Four’s DTV strategies developed in the context of a government decree that the broadcasting industry must move to digital in coming years, an injunction that has been met, however, by substantial consumer resistance. Given the uncertainties and heightened competition, the article highlights through the case of Channel Four the contemporary importance for broadcasters of the development of strategy based on business analysis and market research. The article’s focus is an analysis of the rationales given by Channel Four executives for the DTV strategies that were adopted. It points to the centrality in strategic thinking of projections: predictive, future-oriented discourses informed by the abstractions of media analysts. Before that the article gives a periodization of Channel Four’s place within Britain’s broadcasting ecology based on key phases in its changing positioning since its launch in 1982. In doing so it develops a critique and an extension of Bourdieu’s analysis of cultural fields in relation to contemporary broadcasting. In the last section, the article gives a critical evaluation of the current state of the channel, and of the contradictions arising from its commercialization and diversification, one with wider implications for the hybrid model of PSB represented by Channel Four.