Since the 1980s a combination of political and technological change has challenged the assumption that only public service broadcasters can provide public service broadcast content. This article examines a particular set of responses to this challenge: schemes created to fund public service content production available to both private and public service broadcasters through competitive tenders. This article considers how the working definitions of public service content developed for these schemes work to concretize a hitherto elusive concept. It suggests that the definitions may not always reflect 'common-sense' understandings of public service content, highlighting the problematic nature of the idea of public service content when considered in isolation from public service institutions. It also suggests that scheme definitions may be shaped by contingent external pressures to legitimate public funding of broadcast content and to respond to pressures to 'marketize' the provision of that public content.