A long, long time ago, ITV was not so much a network as a set of regional franchises – except in London, where the franchise was split into ‘weekday and ‘weekend’.
New entrant London Weekend Television won the franchise round in 1968, promising high-brow entertainment. On a Saturday night. You can imagine how well that went down, and the company was soon in trouble.
They were initially rescued by Rupert Murdoch, who installed himself as Chairman with a 39% stake in the company. He was then ousted by the Independent Television Authority, partly on monopoly grounds as he still had substantial UK newspaper interests but also because he was – gasp! – a foreigner.
Murdoch went on to take over a small pan-European satellite station called Sky Channel, and was part of a consortium bidding to the run the by-now Independent Broadcasting Authority’s ill-conceived plan for a UK-wide bouquet of satellite channels.
Needless to say, his consortium didn’t win. But then, neither did British Satellite Broadcasting; it won the IBA licence but ended up merging with Sky a few years later.
Wind forward a few decades, and Sky now has its hands on ITV plc as a whole – although Sky was bought by Comcast in 2018, so perhaps not the great win for Murdoch after all as he doesn’t have a stake in it. Bet he still rubbed his hands together in a C Montgomery Burns manner.
In a way, this is a good deal for Sky. It doesn’t include ITV Studios (the bit that makes programmes), and we all know that “content is king” but that’s not a disaster. It provides outlets that Sky doesn’t have, which might prove handy. Why let Channel 4 have the F1 terrestrial highlights when you have a perfectly good ITV 1 to broadcast them on? Indeed the four ITV channels are quite stable in their demographics now, but do tend to show the same things over and over and over again. Some fresh blood (even if technically old blood) on those channels wouldn’t go amiss.
But what of the rest? ITV plc doesn’t own the two franchisees in Scotland. Will they keep taking the ITV programmes or, as they’ve done in the past, go their own way?
Channel 5 / 5 / Five is owned by Paramount/Skydance alongside a few other channels such as Legend. Not the biggest player but also not going anywhere soon while they keep selling ad space.
And what of Channel 4? Five years ago I pointed out that BBC Studios could buy out the Government and take over Channel 4 (actually, that might have been Phil Redmond’s idea, I’ve slept since then). S4C is already on BBC iPlayer. BBC Studios also owns UKTV. There’s less and less original content on BBC Three, and none at all on BBC Four and 4Seven.
There is ‘talk’ of carrying Channel 4’s streaming service on BBC iPlayer, or merging them somehow (hoping it’s a merger that iPlayer wins, if I’m being honest). But why not include UKTV in this? Advert-carrying channels on one streamer, BBC iPlayer for the rest. This might also help S4C, which has to block adverts from its iPlayer streaming service.
The BBC is going through its own conniptions, of course. The Corporation will 100 years old on 1 January 2027 and is trying to get its next Charter through against a backdrop of cuts. The first experimental TV services started 97 years ago. The next few years could see the UK’s TV landscape change as much as it did when ITV first started in 1955.