Rupert Murdoch was facing a mounting threat to his UK media business on Thursday as Ofcom escalated its probe into whether British Sky Broadcasting was a “fit and proper” owner of a broadcasting licence from a “monitoring phase” to an “evidence-gathering phase”.
The broadcasting regulator has asked News Corp’s News Group Newspapers subsidiary – parent company of The Sun and the now-defunct News of the World – to provide it with a series of documents in relation to the civil litigation that the media company is confronting in the courts.
“Ofcom is gathering evidence which may assist it in assessing whether BSkyB is and remains fit and proper to continue to hold its broadcast licences,” the regulator said when asked whether it had made contact with Mr Murdoch’s UK newspaper business.
whilst at the same time taking the revenue stream away from ITV and leading to the pretty appauling production structure in this country. Most Studiios closed leaving LWT & YTV and an office building in Manchester with an outside lot and a glorified shed for Coronation Street.
That is nothing to do with Sky, and if Sky had never existed ITV would still have had to have made massive changes. Multi-channel TV would still have come about and it still would have been full of imports and cheap programmes
Its not all sky fault of ITV downfall, that at that door of Carlton and Granada.
ITV's problems have few-fold:
* it lost it's monopoly on advertising, and the advertising market has declined
* audiences have become fragmented
* it didn't move fast enough to get a digital strategy - when the BBC and C4 had fully developed websites, ITV was flailing around with 'portals like 'G-whizz'
*it was fragmented and so couldn't focus on developing the network and spent most of the last 15 years endlessly restructuring
Last edited by Inspector Sands on 26 April 2012 6:21pm - 2 times in total
If this had actually gone head and Murdoch got all of BSkyB, do you think we could have seen a US approach to things ie getting rid of Sky News and renaming it FOX News UK and having a FOX UK Channel sloted into the EPG somewhere?
If this had actually gone head and Murdoch got all of BSkyB, do you think we could have seen a US approach to things ie getting rid of Sky News and renaming it FOX News UK and having a FOX UK Channel sloted into the EPG somewhere?
If this had actually gone head and Murdoch got all of BSkyB, do you think we could have seen a US approach to things ie getting rid of Sky News and renaming it FOX News UK and having a FOX UK Channel sloted into the EPG somewhere?
If this had actually gone head and Murdoch got all of BSkyB, do you think we could have seen a US approach to things ie getting rid of Sky News and renaming it FOX News UK and having a FOX UK Channel sloted into the EPG somewhere?
No it seems clear he wants to make
Sky
a pan European brand. Sky UK, Sky Italia, Sky Deutschland etc all owned by one company.
ITV's problems were of it's own making really. I do wonder how different the landscape might have been if when C4 had launched in 1982 it had been allowed to launch as a big network competitor rather than a PSB. At the time ITV would have hated that I'm sure but 30 years on I wonder if C4 - and then C5 - had been launched with the aim of creating a similar market of commercial networks to Australia or the US, complementing the BBC, whether ITV would actually have benefitted from it.
If this had actually gone head and Murdoch got all of BSkyB, do you think we could have seen a US approach to things ie getting rid of Sky News and renaming it FOX News UK and having a FOX UK Channel sloted into the EPG somewhere?
No it seems clear he wants to make
Sky
a pan European brand. Sky UK, Sky Italia, Sky Deutschland etc all owned by one company.
Yes, Sky is a much bigger brand in the UK than Fox. Less so in places like Germany and Italy but there'd still be no real benefit of doing it.
Fox News UK is a different matter, I think they've made no secret to wanting to get the law changed so they can turn Sky into a more-Fox News like channel with opinion as well as news. However even with a change in regulations it wouldn't be anything like the Fox News Channel, which is very much a product of it's Chief Exec Roger Ailes rather than a Murdoch. Also the British news market is very different to the US as is the journalistic culture
ITV's problems were of it's own making really. I do wonder how different the landscape might have been if when C4 had launched in 1982 it had been allowed to launch as a big network competitor rather than a PSB. At the time ITV would have hated that I'm sure but 30 years on I wonder if C4 - and then C5 - had been launched with the aim of creating a similar market of commercial networks to Australia or the US, complementing the BBC, whether ITV would actually have benefitted from it.
Apart from London and maybe Birmingham, none of the regions of the UK are large enough to have US style tv channels/networks and merging the ITV regions could have been good, had ITV not decided to go after the lowest common denominator of programming.
I mean,
THEY CANCELLED
AFTERLIFE
TO MAKE ROOM FOR MORE
BRITAIN'S GOT X FACTOR TALENT GET ME OUT OF HERE
!