Public Service Media Review

The UK media landscape is undergoing rapid transformation. Traditional broadcasters are in a fierce battle for audience attention, while global tech giants flood the market with an ever-growing range of content.

Services like Netflix and YouTube offer hyper-personalised experiences that are hugely popular with viewers and advertisers. In this environment, the PSBs are finding it much harder to fund the production and distribution of high-quality UK content to all audiences.

Public Service Media (PSM) has a long and proud tradition in the UK. The PSBs – the BBC, ITV, STV, Channel 4, Channel 5 and S4C – are the key providers of PSM. They are universally available and highly valued for trusted and accurate news and informative and entertaining UK stories that reflect the diversity of the whole of the UK. This critical content supports participation in democratic society through holding governments and institutions to account and keeping audiences informed about local, national and international events. The PSBs also provide sporting and cultural programming that brings the country together and promotes a sense of shared values. Audiences enjoy PSM content on other broadcast services, subscription video on-demand (SVoD) services and video sharing platforms (VSPs).

At least every five years, Ofcom is required to review the extent to which the PSBs, taken together, have fulfilled the purposes of public service television broadcasting through the provision of the PSB channels. We published our latest assessment for 2019 – 2023 in December 2024 where we concluded that the PSBs had, together, fulfilled the purposes of public service broadcasting.

This document considers the potential remedies to address these challenges and how PSM can be strengthened and maintained in the future. We set out the broad options that a wide range of stakeholders have raised with us and discuss their potential benefits and implications for implementation.

We have set out six recommendations for action, focussed on:

• prominence and discoverability for PSM content on YouTube and potentially other third-party platforms;
• stable and adequate funding to sustain a broad range of PSM content;
• urgent clarity on the future of TV distribution;
• ambitious partnerships amongst the PSBs;
• investment in media literacy to support audiences; and
• streamlined regulation that strips away any outdated unnecessary restrictions, protects audiences from harm wherever they are and to encourage growth and innovation.