15 REPORT Public Service Broadcasting
Anne Mensah, VP of original series at Netflix, resolved that the VOD service has many models, all the way from licensed and co-production to wholly owned. She said: “Sometimes we take the upfront risk when we pay a premium, which allows us to lean into a show that might not be a global hit. At the same time, the British TV industry is so strong at the moment, I hope there are lots of different homes that a person can take their project to.” Benjamin King, director of Public Policy at UK Netflix, jumped on this point: “The strength of the UK’s production ecology resides in the fact that there is a plurality of different models and a whole variety of routes to market as a producer. The brilliance of the UK is that you can come to Netflix or the BBC or go elsewhere. That is what will keep the content coming out of the UK and the companies producing it as vibrant and plural as they are today.” The committee also examined Netflix’s support for diversity of talent, for example, the writers, directors and actors – also indicating these are in short supply – and
the competition from content creators, including PBS, for those services. Baroness Mcintosh of Hudnall said: “There are lots of people who can do the thing (the talent), but there is only ever a small number who can do it really well.” Mensah countered that by stating: “It’s about leaning into all the voices, not just some of them. I believe that it increases the number of people you can play with, alongside training and ensuring we have long-term plans to help people not just with their first job but their second and third ones, to keep them in the business.” She referenced British writer, Laura Nunn, who wrote Sex Education as her first show: “She will go on to write something amazing for the BBC or HBO, that should be brilliant as then someone else will come up, because they worked in her writer’s room.” The committee finished its proceedings by asking Netflix what it is doing to improve the UK government’s apprenticeship levy, which Lord Gordon of Strathblane defined as “too much of a straitjacket to do anything sensible in the creative sector”.
CONTENT IS KING Ben King, director of Public Policy at UK Netflix, believes the strength of the UK’s TV production industry lies in the plurality of models
While Netflix is a recipient of high-tax relief, it is voluntarily contributing to the ScreenSkills levy and to the apprenticeship levy. Netflix’s King said: “There are some challenges with the deployment of the apprenticeship levy in our sector. It would benefit from some reform to allow us to unlock in a figurative and material sense the opportunity it could create.” And when questioned about the introduction of an SVOD levy, which is referred to by the committee as a ‘contestable fund’, he noted that: “When we talk about public policy interventions in this space or any other, we have to be clear about what the problem is that they are intended to solve. It seems that the concept of an SVOD levy is a solution in search of a problem, because the reality is funding for UK content is at an all-time high. “I am not sure that a levy, or contestable fund as you called it, would necessarily either stimulate investment in a different kind of content or lead to better outcomes for audiences.” Oral evidence has now concluded, and a report is in preparation. Stay tuned for our FEED analysis of this in the upcoming issues.
THE POLITICS SHOW The Communications Committee’s inquiry was streamed on parliamentlive.tv
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