ITN

Just wanting to touch on a few things ITN.


Don't worry, I'm not going to go off into fantasy land where say, C4, wanting to secure their position as a public service broadcaster, buy a stake in ITN and we see the ITN News Channel reborn as a replacement for Quiz Call. Unfortunately that's not going to happen!


However, with ITN now concentrating on On-demand bulletins for mobile and broadband, do you think there may be a possibility of them launching a Video-on-Demand service on Cable and perhaps BT Vision.

Rather than the traditional 24 hour channel it would be a service offering short round up of the key UK, World, Sport, Business etc. news, plus a few reports on the top stories. Basically nothing not seen on Sky News Active - but this would be all On-demand rather than looped.

And I doubt it cost them much too as they are already producing the bulletins for mobiles and broadband!


Also we've mentioned it here before but has anyone had access to ITN's 24 hour online news channel. You can access it via the ITN site, but you need a subscription to Greengrass.

If anyone has seen it, what does it offer - is it basically just a looped bulletin or does it offer something more?

Why would ITN want to get back into setting up a news channel when they've recently had to terminate the previous one? That wouldn't seem to be a terribly wise commercial decision to me. News channels don't make money!

Did you actually read my post?

The closure of the ITV News Channel was purely a political decision, rather than an economic one. ITV wanted the space on Freeview that ITV has for ITV4 and CITV. Rather than try to run it purely as a satellite and cable channel, they just gave up, despite the fact that ITN has access to resources from CNN, NBC and the Nine Network in Australia, as well as the ITV regions. If they had made a decision to make more use of those resources, they would have been able to keep the channel going, and even eventually make a slight profit.

If you want to see how a news channel can be done cheaply, just look at the Sky Sports News operation. Lots of interviews on that are done by telephone, and that doesn't require sending lots of people out to make reports for the channel. Nor does it require a lot of expensive equipment such as satellite trucks and transponder space. Also a lot of those reports are the same ones that are done for Sky News, with a different outcue tagged on at the end.

And they wanted that because they believed ITV4 / CITV would be more profitable than ITV News Channel, i.e. an economic decision.

and let's not forget that ITV only bought into the News Channel to deflect some negative feedback from the ITV Digital collapse.

You say that the closure of the News Channel was purely a political decision and yet you then seem to put the case for it's demise on economic grounds. ITV wanted the channel space for other channels which it hoped would offer more viewers and therefore more revenue in addition to less costs than the News Channel. That's a financial decision!

Yes I did, it's just that I have a different view on whether your suggestion would be expensive to run or not. And whatever the costs involved, who would pay? ITN don't seem to be a broadcaster in their own right per se - they supply news services to clients.