TV Round-Up – 1996
Overall in 1996 ITV revenue was up 4.9% year on year from £1.578bn to £1.656bn while C4 did better with a growth of 10% to nearly £489m. Total combined revenue for the year came in at £2.145bn, which is a year on year growth of 6.1%.
On average, ABC1 Adults showed the greatest rise in CPT, up 2.07% year on year to 1,575p while Men were the only other category to show an increase at 1.93%. Average impacts for 1996 were down across the board, with Housewives with Children showing the greatest decrease – they were down 7.3% year on year while Adults dropped 5.7%.
In terms of viewing shares over 1996, while amongst all individuals ITV maintained a share of 35.1% against BBC1’s 32.5%, this is a year on year fall of 2.1% points for ITV and an increase of 0.3% points for BBC1. Amongst ABC1 adults however ITV performed badly, with share falling to 31.8% compared to BBC1’s growth to 36.1%, its highest category share. Cable and satellite viewing had a strong bias towards children, housewives with kids and men. Children’s share of viewing for non-terrestrial grew 16.6%. While BBC1 experienced only slight year on year changes in its viewing minutes, ITV lost large amounts of viewing time across all of its categories. The largest was among Housewives/Kids which was down 53 minutes to 602 minutes. Among ABC1 Adults BBC1 was watched on average for 55 minutes longer than ITV.
The big industry stories of the year were probably the award of the Channel 5 licence to Channel 5 Broadcasting, the sales row between CIA Medianetwork and Laser, and the move towards the launch of digital television.
Amid a highly public court case rival bidders such as Virgin, UKTV and New Century TV failed to overturn the ITC’s decision to award the licence for Channel 5 to Channel 5 Broadcasting. The rest of the year was dominated by Channel 5’s retuning problems, with reports of the retuning programme running massively over budget and behind schedule.The award of a new frequency on which C5 could broadcast meant extra homes would need to be retuned and allowed the station to put back its launch date from January 1 1997 to 31 March 1997.
In October Laser announced that it would be issuing a writ against CIA for money it claimed was owed from previous sales deals. The dispute festered for a number of weeks before CIA agreed to pay a lump sum in order to stop the legal proceedings. The very public nature of the dispute highlighted what many in the industry saw as the “can of worms” that is TV airtime trading, provoking debate about the whole process but in particular questioning once again the idea of agency deals.
Fears were expressed throughout the year that the launch of digital television in 1997 would be jeopardised by a broadcaster gaining a monopoly over the production of set-top boxes, allowing only its programmes to be shown. These were allayed to an extent in November when the Department of Trade and Industry issued guidelines which aimed to allow all broadcasters “fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory” access to the digital services. As part of the general move toward digital the BBC announced a partnership with Flextech, the cable and satellite programming group, which entailed the creation of eight new channels which would be carried on digital services.