Outgoing communications minister Stephen Carter talks to Broadcast on the eve of the final Digital Britain report, which comes out tomorrow afternoon.
Although he says nothing new about the report, Carter says it seems clear that the new broadcasting landscape will be one where the commercial players (such as ITV and Five) and the publicly owned BBC and Channel 4 will be much more polarised.
Carter’s team is looking at ways of sustaining plurality in regional news alongside the BBC and finding a way of replacing what ITV’s regional news operation currently does.
“We have discovered in the process of moving from the interim report to the final report that there is pretty close to universal agreement that we’re are going to see a much sharper separation between what gets done by commercial players and what gets done by the state,” Carter tells Broadcast.
“Up until now there’s been a bit of a blurring of that. We’re now getting to a point where it’s very clear that there’s going to be the commercial market and then there’s going to be the public interventions.”
Here’s a second clip on the future of local news. Again, nothing new here. All the answers will be in tomorrow’s report, expected at about 3.30pm.
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