PSB and Commercial Radio

PSB and Commercial radio

Commercial and PSB radios...

PSB

In the UK the term PSB refers to broadcasting for the public benefit rather than purely for commercial reasons, the regulator body OFCOM, specifies that only certain TV and radio broadcasters fulfil certain requirements as part of their signed agreement for them to broadcast at all. All the BBC’s TV / Radio channels have a public service remit, even those which are digitally formatted.

 Also, all other channels on terrestrial analogue TV – ITV, Channel 4 and Five are in a contract to provide public  service programming , they have to do this because they can be freely viewed all across the nation for free basically. Recently introduced ‘third tier’ of almost 200 community radio services are specially recognised by Ofcom for being providers of public service broadcasting.

Commercial

Commercial Radio’s are awarded with a licence from Ofcom to allow the broadcast in their given areas, they are tested and nominated through which radio station is the best, and they call this procedure ‘A Beauty Contest’. Stations submit highly detailed applications containing their proposed format .With that, Ofcom can choose if it is suitable for the area and if that genre of station is needed.

The majority of stations in the UK broadcast to a city or a group of towns within an average radius of 20 – 50 miles, second tier regional stations cover larger areas, such as West midlands. The normal genre of these stations is pop, but in different cities the music taste is catered for them and on digital radio.

In most cases of working as an independent company, a lot of the local stations are owned by larger radio groups which broadcast to many different areas. The largest radio operator is ‘Global Radio’.