YouTube Says Somebody Has to Lose. Britain Is Fighting Back

Silicon Valley brass may be used to a grilling by Congress — but have they ever faced an audience of scrappy British TV producers?

Last week, YouTube became the first streamer to deliver the Edinburgh TV Festival’s prestigious James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture, the annual keynote that sets the agenda for British television. In a 30-minute speech, the company’s EMEA boss, self-proclaimed Anglophile Pedro Pina, lurched between comparing YouTube’s ascent to the invention of photography, which upset Victorian painters (the broadcasters, in his analogy), and promising a Third Golden Age of Television if only TV would adapt to changing audience habits.

The audience wasn’t having it. “We’re not idiots,” a British producer bristled. “We don’t need the business explained to us.”

Pina implored the room not to view YouTube as “the villain” or the end of broadcasting. “This next chapter of British television will not be a tragedy,” he said. “It will be an epic.”

The Google-owned platform was at the center of virtually every conversation at the Scottish festival (which is moving to Manchester next year), as more producers and broadcasters experiment with direct-to-consumer strategies. Pina gave the room almost nothing on the company’s U.K. commercial strategy. (Asked this week for comment, YouTube said Pina continues to work with producers, broadcasters and creators to be successful on the platform, and wants to deepen those partnerships.)

The exception was a threat. He held back on policy specifics, other than the company’s stance on “prominence” — the requirement that British public service broadcasters such as the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 be given clear visibility on a platform above other networks. YouTube’s answer is no. If the U.K. government forces prominence for public-service media on the platform, the Portugal-born exec said in his lecture, rather ominously, that it “could put future partnerships in jeopardy.” 

In an onstage interview the next day, Pina called visibility on YouTube a “zero-sum game.” “For certain things to go forward, a few things have to go backward,” he said. Every slot the government reserves for a public broadcaster, he argued, is one the algorithm would otherwise have filled with a recommendation built for that particular viewer. “I’m not sure people are prepared for that,” he said.

The government is pushing back. In an exclusive statement to The Ankler, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport rejected Pina’s premise: “We do not see this as a zero-sum game.”

What Britain intends to do about it — and why YouTube may have an internal fight of its own — is another matter.

Below:

• What the BBC’s new boss learned in 18 years at Google — and how he’ll use it to fight back against YouTube
• DCMS’ full exclusive statement that reveals its plan of action
• The part of British TV the government is most determined to protect
• Why YouTube’s European teams may be quietly at odds with Silicon Valley
• Why producers are building shows without waiting for broadcasters
• The Trevor Noah show that’s following a disruptive new model to get to audiences