BBC salaries and Digital Radio

The BBC Trust today published it’s report into the alleged overpayment of it’s top on-screen presenters. If you remember, last year details of salaries and ‘golden handcuff’ deals were leaked to the press and alleged that Jonathan Ross was up for £18m over 3 years, Wogan £800k pa and Moyles £630k pa.

Basically, the report says that whilst they’re quite rightly not confirming what the actual salaries are, apparently, and I have no reason to doubt it, the Trust say that the figures are fair and not above the market rate. Then again, I don’t know anyone in commercial radio getting anything like this! The real response is that in terms of radio the BBC has no true competition, but to be honest as a society we’re probably better off for it. As has been proved, you just can’t provide anything remotely like BBC Radio 4 or Five Live on a commercial basis. And as for BBC Radios 1, 2 and 3, again, not without compromising so much that you lose the essence and public value of the services.

I’ve wondered before about the value of the BBC Radio digital spin-offs (hmm, perhaps I need to get out more…). 1-Extra and Asian Network are part of the corporation’s diversity commitment from receiving the license fee and as such do a good job. Radio 7 exploits the archive and delivers targetted children’s programmes. Sports Extra delivers a better return on the high costs of rights. And 6-Music, well, ermm… OK, so nothing comes to mind right now, but overall the cost of delivering these services is small, in the grand scale of things. I’ve seen the pie chart break up of how the license fee is spent and I’m happy with the minuscule sliver allocated to the digital radio channels!

But this arguement just doesn’t hold up in commercial industry. We’re seen a handful of digital channels fold over the past few months and Planet Rock only just survived by the skin of it’s teeth, thanks to a individual fan. Is this just the business model of Digital One, the national commercial DAB multiplex operator? The jury’s out on that one, but I don’t know what the alternative would be.

On the face of it regional digital radio, rather than national, is doing quite the opposite. Veritably flourishing! Ofcom seems to be licensing new multiplexes all the time and I see there are even fairly well developed plans afoot for the next generation local city based ones. And the number of DAB digital radio receivers is getting really quite reasonable now. Oh how different from just a few years ago…