In April 2025, the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee published British Film and High-End Television, a report whose headline recommendation — a 5% levy on UK subscriber revenue from streaming services, ring-fenced for British content — has dominated the UK creative-policy conversation ever since. A year on, with the Media Act 2024 now being operationalised by Ofcom and a new round of consultations on platform prominence underway, the debate has hardened into a familiar shape: global streamers versus public service broadcasters, with British producers caught somewhere in the middle.
People of Internet's view is that the UK has every right to support its public service broadcasters and its independent production sector. Both are genuine assets. But the policy instruments now on the table — a revenue levy plus mandatory prominence — are blunter than the problem requires, and risk discouraging exactly the investment they purport to attract.
What the CMS Committee actually proposed
The committee's central recommendation is a 5% levy on the UK subscriber revenue of subscription video-on-demand services, modelled loosely on France's CNC contribution and similar continental schemes. The proceeds would flow into a cultural fund supporting independent British high-end television, particularly mid-budget drama which the committee found is being squeezed out as commissioners chase global hits.
The diagnosis is real. UK independent producers have warned for several years that "domestic" drama with a distinctively British voice — the kind that historically made the BBC and Channel 4 internationally famous — is harder to finance now that streamers anchor the high end of the market. The committee's instinct to protect that pipeline is understandable.
The remedy, however, treats streamers as outsiders extracting value rather than as the largest single source of new investment in UK production. The BFI's own data has consistently shown that inward investment from US-headquartered streamers and studios accounts for the majority of UK film and high-end TV spend; that investment is one of the reasons UK production infrastructure, from Shepperton to Leavesden, has expanded dramatically in the last five years.
The Media Act 2024 and the prominence question
Parallel to the levy debate, the Media Act 2024 — which received Royal Assent in May 2024 — has handed Ofcom the job of requiring "designated" on-demand platforms and connected TVs to give "appropriate prominence" to UK public service broadcaster content. In practice, this means the iPlayer, ITVX, Channel 4 and Channel 5 apps must be easy to find on Samsung, LG, Amazon Fire and Roku interfaces, and PSB content must be reasonably discoverable inside aggregator surfaces.
Most reasonable observers accept the principle. PSBs sit at the heart of the UK information ecosystem and a smart TV that hid the iPlayer behind eight menu screens would be a problem. But prominence rules can drift quickly from "reasonably discoverable" to "mandated placement on the first screen," and that line matters. The more granularly regulators specify the user interface, the less room platforms have to innovate on recommendations, accessibility, and personalisation — features that disproportionately benefit users with niche tastes, disabilities, or limited English.
The question is not whether British content deserves support. It is whether revenue levies and UI mandates are the cheapest, least distortionary way to deliver it.
Why a revenue levy is the wrong tool
Three problems with the proposed 5% levy stand out.
- It taxes the activity you want more of. Streamers earn UK subscriber revenue partly because they invest heavily in UK-shot content. A levy on subscriber revenue is, in effect, a tax on the consumer side of a business whose production side is already a major contributor to the UK economy. Some of that cost will be passed to subscribers; some will reduce headroom for the very commissions the levy aims to support.
- It assumes substitution that may not happen. Levy proceeds funnelled to a state-administered fund will not necessarily commission the same shows the market would have made absent the levy. Cultural funds tend to back projects that look like previous successful projects — a known weakness of the French and German systems the UK is being asked to imitate.
- It picks a fight the UK does not need. A revenue levy on US-headquartered platforms invites reciprocal scrutiny of UK creative exports at a moment when the UK is trying to grow services trade. France has absorbed that political cost because cultural sovereignty is a founding principle of its policy tradition; the UK's tradition is rather different.
A more proportionate path
If the goal is more mid-budget British drama, the UK already has a working instrument: the High-End Television Tax Relief, recently enhanced for independent productions with budgets between £1m and £15m per hour. Expanding that relief, tightening its cultural test, and pairing it with targeted BFI grant funding would address the production-financing gap directly without inserting a new tax into the consumer streaming market.
On prominence, Ofcom should resist the temptation to legislate user interfaces in detail. A "reasonably discoverable" standard, backed by transparency reporting on PSB carriage and discoverability metrics, would protect the public interest without freezing platform design. Smart TVs and streaming apps are still rapidly evolving products; codifying today's UI assumptions into tomorrow's regulation is a recipe for stagnation.
The bigger picture
British creative success has historically come from openness — from coproduction, from foreign investment, and from a regulatory environment that trusted producers and broadcasters to find audiences rather than mandating which screens they appeared on. The CMS Committee's report is right that something needs to change in how the UK supports independent production. It is wrong that a streaming levy and prescriptive prominence rules are the way to do it.
The UK can choose a closed, protectionist version of cultural policy, or it can choose to remain the global production hub it has become. The next twelve months of Media Act implementation will tell us which path Westminster prefers.