PSB leaders mark Freely launch
June 25, 2024
By Colin Mann
Tim Davie (Director General, BBC), Dame Carolyn McCall (CEO, ITV), Alex Mahon (CEO, Channel 4) and Sarah Rose (President, Channel 5) have marked the launch of new streaming service Freely.
They highlighted the importance of public service broadcasting, and the role Freely can play in its future.
Davie commented on the power of public service broadcasters and their universality: “[…] People want to go to a service they can trust, they want to get to IP (internet protocol) with people they trust and this group has real care and at our heart, we are public service broadcasters. […] If you want to keep a society together, it’s having free access to these services, where prominence is not about the person who can pay the biggest check. […] The other thing is the editorial quality of local content. This group is unique in the world. We talk ourselves down as a country too often, but we are market leaders in this. I was in Europe last week and everyone is looking at what we’re doing and they absolutely see us as a world leader. We should double down in areas where we really have global strength and this is one of them. We have enough scale to compete and that’s an amazing thing.”
McCall discussed Freely’s role in bringing British content to viewers: “There’s a really big demand for British content compared to the streamers. The streamers wouldn’t have made Mr Bates vs The Post Office or a lot of shows we do that are public service. They can be big hits, but they are still public service. […] Viewers want that, and every survey shows that British viewers really want to see more British content made about British issues, British families, etc. so that means this [Freely] is meeting a viewer need, it is making it very, very easy for viewers.”
Mahon stressed the significance of free access to content and public trust: “People want free. It’s all well to talk about other subscription services, but people want free, especially when things aren’t looking so good. […] They don’t want thousands of services, but they do want to find content they trust. So, we have to evolve to make it easy for them to find trusted, truthful, impartial content. And, amazingly, we can operate together, because in France, Germany, and other countries they want to know how we’re doing this, they want to bring it to their audiences there. […] The UK PSB VOD players are growing, the growth rates this year are off the charts and that’s really important. That is a sign of audience demand for particularly British content […] In the battle for truth, that is the key thing that we must deliver. And we must change how we do it in order to deliver it.”
Rose highlighted the simplicity of Freely: “From a viewer’s perspective, it’s the simplicity. […] The team have taken a very long time and has worked incredibly well to get something intuitive, simple and easy to use. […] All viewers want to know is intuitively they can find their content, our content.”
US analyst and media cartographer, Evan Shapiro, said: “Efforts like Freely can help the connected TV ecosystem solve the consumers’ paradox of choice. It’s a great example of putting audiences squarely at the centre of the TV experience. It’s an amazing example of the kind of radical collaboration necessary to create the kind of radical transformation that the UK media needs right now. Freely can help ensure that the UK public service media does much more than survive in the user-centric era, that it also thrives.”