The
BBC, whose broadcasting in the UK is funded by a
licence fee and does not sell advertising time, is most notable for being the first public service broadcaster in the UK. Its first director general,
Lord Reith introduced many of the concepts that would later define public service broadcasting in the UK when he adopted the mission to "
inform, educate and entertain". With the launch of the first commercial broadcaster
ITV in 1955, the government required that the local franchises fulfilled a similar obligation, mandating a certain level of local news coverage, arts and religious programming, in return for the right to broadcast. The next commercial television broadcasters in the UK, the state-owned
Channel 4 and
S4C, were set up by the government in 1981 to provide different forms of public broadcasting.
Channel 4 was required to be a public service alternative to the
BBC and to cater for minorities and arts.
S4C was to be a mainly
Welsh language programmer. Neither was required to be commercially successful as
Channel 4 was subsidised by the
ITV network and
S4C received a grant from the central government. However,
Channel 4 was later restructured under the
Broadcasting Act 1990 to be a state owned corporation that is self-financing and from 2013, the
BBC took over funding for S4C. When the final
analogue terrestrial broadcaster,
Channel 5, was launched in 1997, it too was given a number of public service requirements. These included the obligation to provide minimum amounts of programming from various genres, minimum amounts of programming originally commissioned by the channel and of European origin, and maximum limits on the number of repeats. ==Future viability==