The Trust's review of BBC syndication

It's been five years since the BBC launched the iPlayer.

Five years ago, the BBC, like other broadcasters, was taking the first steps into a new world of on-demand content. It's hard to remember by now that until then you could only watch or listen to programmes either at the point of broadcast or be remembering in advance to set a recording. Even when the iPlayer launched, it began as a relatively simple matter of accessing programmes on PCs through the BBC website.

Fast-forward five years and audiences can get, and expect to get, BBC content on-demand through set-top boxes, PCs, mobile phones, tablet computers like iPads, games consoles, and internet-connected TVs.

So a lot has changed since the BBC Trust established the policy governing how BBC content would be made available to audiences on-demand in the future. This is why we began a review of syndication policy in 2010. Our guiding principle throughout has been that BBC on-demand content should be available to as many licence fee payers, and on as many platforms, as possible. New technology has huge potential to enhance the public value of BBC content and to help the BBC deliver on its Charter commitments.

To achieve this, we need to ensure that syndication of BBC programmes and content is done in a way consistent with the BBC's Public Purposes, giving good value for money, and with as little adverse effect as possible on the commercial market.

Getting to the policy we are publishing today has been a challenge, but I am confident that we have got the right balance. Stakeholders raised some concerns about our provisional conclusions published early in 2011, which proposed that BBC content should be syndicated via three standard technical versions of the iPlayer. We undertook further research to understand their concerns, and changed our approach.

What we now have is a policy which recognises that syndication through the iPlayer – or a future on-demand service – provides benefits for audiences and best serves the principles we have set out. But it includes some flexibility in light of changing technology and audience expectations. In special circumstances where the standard iPlayer is not the best solution, the new policy enables the BBC to enter into special arrangements with syndication partners.

Above all, the final policy is founded on principles with the interests of licence fee payers at their core, with which all syndication arrangements must comply. The principles include easy accessibility of the full range of BBC on-demand content, that it should be high quality, accessible free of charge, and must include parental controls and accessibility features.

The new policy provides considerably more clarity for the wider industry and for BBC management than the previous outdated one. In particular it sets out the factors that must be taken into consideration by the BBC when deciding how and where to syndicate BBC content.

None of us can predict now how advances in technology in the next few years will affect the way audiences will be able to access BBC content in the future. But we're confident that this new policy will enable the BBC to develop in tandem with technology in order to meet licence fee payers' expectations of having the BBC's high quality and distinctive content available on-demand, and on the broad range of devices that they want.