Public service broadcasting is both competing against industry behemoths and dealing with unprecedented political pressure, Noel Curran, CEO of the EBU, revealed at the IBC2025 Conference.
“The audience is core for us, our weekly reach is still over 80% and with younger audiences our weekly reach is around 65%, and that is under different pressures,” he said.
In the competition for eyeballs, Curran focuses on content creation. “I’m a content person, I was a TV producer, with all the money and technology in the world, if you make terrible programmes nobody will watch you.”
Despite trust levels falling everywhere, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) is still the number one trusted source of news in the vast majority of European countries, he said. “We live in a more polarised world, with more aggressive articulations of one’s views through social media, our strong trust figures are hard won as we are competing against opinion. We have to be careful about entering the opinion space.”
Recent tensions around Israël’s participation in the Eurovision song contest are “some of the most difficult issues we have faced,” according to Curran, who describes a democratic decision-making process within the member organisation. “It’s a member decision. We understand there are different views and must manage that, but it’s tricky as views are diametrically opposed.”
In the last eight months, the impact of global political changes, in the US in particular, on media sovereignty and the need for European companies to balance relationships with American tech giants has emerged, according to Curran. “We want to work with American companies. We are looking at what our members will require from them in terms of assuaging or easing these concerns that they have around sovereignty.”
The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) recently welcomed the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA) coming into force, stating it will strengthen media independence and pluralism. Discover more here.
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