The BBC yesterday published building Public Value: renewing the BBC for a digital world‘ and thus puts forward its position in the wake of Ofcom’s PSB review and the upcoming Charter Renewal.

The manifesto covers nine key points:

* Building digital Britain

* Programmes and services that build public value through: active and informed citizenship; British culture and creativity; a revolution in learning; connected communities and building the UK’s voice in the world

* A new test of public value

* The right scale and scope - reviews underway looking at the breadth of BBC services, depth and vertical integration in our production base and commissioning needs and commercial activities

* A new approach to partnerships

* Shifting investment and jobs from London to the rest of the UK to reflect the life and experience of the whole UK

* A more open BBC - putting audiences at the centre of everything we do

* Self help and a modernised license fee

* Reforming BBC Governance

Some personal viewpoints on the above:

* An interesting statement that ‘Broadband…is a public service medium’ is made. The institution puts building digital Britain at the heart of their remit and thus shifts the debate from preventing market failure to providing digital content that the public can ‘use freely and in perpetuity’. This, to me, sounds almost like proposing a new framework for IP.

* For those who are not familiar with the new buzzword ‘public value’ I include a link to a paper by the Prime Minister’s strategy unit explaining the concept. It will be interesting to see how the benchmarks for measuring, for example, the contributions to ‘Enriching UK culture and Creativity’ will be determined.

* I find the BBC’s objective to ignite a ‘revolution in learning’ very promising. After all, digital fundamentally changes how we locate knowledge and digest it - at work, school and home. The paper includes five action points, which will be useful for assessing whether this has been achieved.

* Finally, as a non-British, the paper contains one objective that I do not understand. Why, on earth, does the BBC have a role to showcase the best of British culture to a global audience?

Personally, I have performed a u-turn regarding my opinion of the future of PSB. I agree with Mr Grade when he says that ‘the bigger and more intensely competitive market-led broadcasting becomes - the tougher the ratings wars, the tighter the budgets - the more necessary it becomes to have the BBC”. In the end, efficiency and individual choice cannot be a means to an end when it comes to media policy. Only in ideal terms, a purely market based model for broadcasting does just that.