A FUTURE FOR PUBLIC SERVICE TELEVISION CONTENT AND PLATFORMS IN A DIGITAL WORLD

CONTENT AND PLATFORMS IN A DIGITAL WORLD
that started out as a regional network, but
perhaps unsurprising given that it is now a
single entity with a management sitting in
London.
At one point ITV threatened to walk away
from making regional news, and Ofcom
proposed that its regional news be taken over
by independently funded news consortia
(to be paid for out of the BBC licence fee).
This idea, hatched towards the end of the
last Labour government, was abandoned by
the coalition government in 2010, in favour
of developing local news across the UK,
an evolving experiment that we examine
in Chapter 8. ITV remains in charge of its
regional news provision.
In the field of national news, ITV has fallen
much further behind the BBC. Much of the
fault lies with the decision to axe its flagship
News at Ten in 1999, which led to the BBC
moving its main nightly bulletin into the
10pm slot. This led to the notorious ‘News at
When?’ period, followed by the ITV evening
news bulletin’s move to the 10.30pm slot.
News at Ten was restored to its original slot in
2008. The ITV bulletin retains authority and
has had an interesting makeover in recent
months, but in viewing terms ITV news as a
whole has suffered. ITV still had a 27% share
of TV news viewing in 2006, but accounted
for just 13% in 2014, while the BBC’s share
has risen from 60% to 77% over the same
period. 237
There was nothing irrational about ITV’s
decision to reduce spend on certain ‘public
service’ genres and its efforts to get its
remaining quotas reduced. It is after
all a listed company accountable to its
shareholders and seeks to maximise profits
for them. Like many other companies it has
been cutting costs against a backdrop of
increasing competition in commercial TV
and some turbulent times in the advertising
market (not least in 2008-09). Indeed it
sometimes seemed to be facing a serious
threat to its business model, whereas now it is
flourishing commercially.
It is also important to acknowledge that
ITV continues to invest more than any other
broadcaster, apart from the BBC, in original
UK content and that this, in itself, s a very
important contribution to the overall public
service television ecology. Without ITV’s
investment in drama and entertainment, the
overall landscape would be dominated by
a BBC that faced much less home-grown
competition. This is not a contribution to be
underestimated.
We believe that it is legitimate to question
the depth of ITV’s commitment to public
service television today. ITV itself does not
make much of it: there is no reference to
‘public service’ or to news and current affairs
in ITV’s most recent annual report, which
focuses instead on drama, entertainment
and factual entertainment as the genres that
produce “programmes that return and travel
internationally”. 238
234
Ofcom, PSB in the Internet Age, 2015, p. 4.
235
See the licences on the Ofcom website.
236
Ibid. ITV can now fold the non-news part of the requirement into news programmes. The picture is again different outside England. In
Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, STV or ITV has to broadcast an average of 4 hours of regional news a week, with another hour and a
half – or two hours in the case of Northern Ireland – of non-news programmes. Border also has different arrangements.
237
The figures are taken from two separate Ofcom reports: New news, future news, 2007, p. 18; and News consumption in the UK 2015, 2015, p. 22.
238
ITV plc Annual Report and Accounts 2015, p. 16. There is passing reference to “legislative and regulatory requirements” on p. 17.
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