Public service broadcasting could be defined by the mission and purpose given to the BBC in the 1920s from its first director, John Reith, to ‘inform, educate and to entertain’. A broad statement which encompasses several different elements in terms of appealing directly to viewers as entertainment and having a wide social purpose to both educate and to inform. Aims which would therefore incorporate two main ideologies: firstly, television should provide the public with programmes that they want to watch and secondly that it purposely satisfies wider social requirements such as education and promotion of ‘citizenship’.
In 2012, the digital switchover was put in place and the analogue terrestrial television signal was switched off throughout
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Many viewers are now spending substantial sums of money for pay television services which provide multiple different channels with the ability and availability to stream programmes and live television on many different types of digital devices. Television has moved away from the thin conceptualisation that it once had in the past and instead represents a much wider and more complex set of distribution platforms and technologies and with a large number of different finance models and providers. Television is no longer just a platform for broadcasting streams but instead offers viewers a much more varied and flexible viewing experience which fits in with the busy lifestyles of today. These include services which provide catch-up TV and recording and a range of on-demand services which allow viewers to watch programmes of their choosing whenever they wish to view them. These advancements are solely down to the increasing links between television to the internet and telecommunications services which are increasing viewer’s interactions with advertisers, broadcasters and other viewers. These advancements ultimately raise the issue of public service broadcasting and its significance in this new