Dyke Calls On Government To Strengthen ITV
BBC director general, Greg Dyke, has a called for Government intervention to prevent the collapse of ITV as a public service broadcaster and has given his support to the proposed Carlton and Granada merger.
Dyke told delegates at this year’s Edinburgh Television Festival, said that the meltdown of the advertising market and increasing competition from multichannel broadcasters had left ITV so weak that financial help was needed to prevent it abandoning its traditional public service role.
Delivering the Richard Dunn Memorial Lecture, Dyke claimed that ITV’s weakness had led to the British broadcasting landscape being dominated by two “800lb gorillas” in the form of the BBC and BSkyB.
He said: “A healthy broadcasting market in the UK needs a third gorilla alongside the BBC and Sky, and that third gorilla should be an advertiser-funded, free to air television group with ITV at its heart.”
Dyke dismissed claims that ITV’s relative collapse was due to an increasingly commercial BBC and criticised the network’s executives for a series of managerial mistakes. These included investing £1.2 billion on the now defunct ITV Digital, spending in excess of £100 million of the Premiership football rights and moving the News At Ten from its original slot.
He argued that the situation was made worse by the advertising recession, which caused the network’s revenue to drop from £2 billion a year to £1.7 billion, and the growth of multichannel television, which simultaneously helped to bring ITV1’s share of viewing down from 30% to 24%.
However, the notoriously competitive former LWT chief executive emphasised the importance of a strong ITV and insisted that the proposed £2.6 billion merger of Carlton and Granada should be allowed to proceed under reasonable terms. He also called on Ofcom and the Treasury to recognise that ITV is no longer the “cash cow” that it once was and cannot afford to be paying more than £300 million a year for its analogue licence.
Dyke warned that, without change, the future would be bleak for viewers and programme makers alike. He said that commercial imperatives would see less money being spent on ITV’s traditional commitment to public service programming and claimed that work was already underway to model the effects of taking up to £300 million out of the network programming budget.
He also suggested that the worst case scenario would see ITV choosing to give up its analogue television licences and broadcast solely on satellite and cable. He said: “I suspect that sometime later this decade the owners of ITV will decide that it is no longer worth their while keeping ITV as a public service commercial broadcaster.”
“ITV could simply rent digital capacity from satellite, cable and Freeview operators and give up its analogue spectrum and most of its public service obligations. It would keep only the ones which made commercial sense,” he added.
Dyke ended his speech by emphasising the role of the BBC in the digital revolution and announced the Corporation’s plans to open up its television archive to the public.
He said: “Up until now this huge resource has remained locked up, inaccessible to the public because there hasn’t been an effective mechanism for distribution. But the digital revolution and broadband are changing all that. For the first time there is an easy and affordable way of making this treasure trove of BBC content available to all.”
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