ITV viewers could soon be forced to pay £3 a month to watch their favourite shows, such as Coronation Street and The X Factor.
A report from the broadcaster’s City bank, the Swiss group UBS, urges financially-strapped ITV “to act now” by switching from a “free channel” to a “pay TV channel” by using Sky and Virgin Media.
The four ITV channels would then disappear overnight from Freeview. ITV1 would cease to be “Channel 3” and viewers wanting to watch ITV would be forced to take up a subscription with either Sky or Virgin.
I think if ITV went to Subscription based broadcasting it would be like comitting suicide for the broadcaster and i would take a guess it would have to surrender its channel 3 license.
No matter what state ITV are in, they are essential for television. With no ITV, there is no competition for the BBC so slowly but surely their ratings will drop because they will have nothing to try and beat. I'm glad Grade has confirmed this as false, such a move would ruin TV in the UK imo.
Plus wouldn't ofcom fine them a fortune if they abadonned their licences?
They wouldn't be abandoning a broadcast licence. They'd lose the slot they're guaranteed on position 3 on Freeview, Sky and Virgin and disappear off into channel two hundred and something, plus all of the Public Service Broadcasting stuff requirements which would be kind of hard to fulfil when your viewer base drops 90% in one go.
It's an interesting question, what would Ofcom do if ITV dropped their PSB commitments and drop the privileges of being Channel 3? I'm not sure there's a lot they can do. It's akin to what happens if a broadcast business goes bust, such as ITV Digital went bankrupt, all the ITC did was strip Carlton and Granada of the licence and put it back out to tender. Whether you could do such a thing with ITV's broadcast space, well I suppose it's no different to the franchise rounds of 1968, 1980 and 1991 for a broadcasting company to change hands.
An article from The Guardian published last April asked the question "If ITV opts out of public service broadcasting, who will take it on", with the statement:
[the chief executive of Ofcom stated that] if they [ITV] chose to abandon PSB status, then they should immediately expect to forfeit all the benefits that come with it - especially gifted digital spectrum.
In the case of ITV the economics of going digital solely] would change sufficiently to make the network's stock in trade - high-quality UK drama and entertainment - unprofitable and likely to be replaced by a cheaper schedule featuring much less high-quality UK content. And if that were to happen there would be nothing Ofcom could do about it, other than hope the BBC remained strong enough to compete.
The Telegraph painted a painfully gloomy scene of a world without ITV:
[Due to falling ad revenue, ITV] could simply go bankrupt, taking all its programmes with it. More likely it would be broken up and the bits sold to the highest bidder. Lucrative programme brands such as Coronation Street and Emmerdale would be attractive to BSkyB, which could put them on a subscription channel. But even Sky doesn't have ITV's £1 billion-a-year programme budget. What future, then, for £1 million-an-hour entertainment shows such as The X Factor and Britain's Got Talent, which rely on phone votes from huge audiences – the kind of ratings still achievable only by the five traditional analogue channels?
What is at stake is nothing less than the future of popular, commercial, British-made television. There are no votes to be won at a general election by saving Channel 4 – but for ITV to hit the buffers on Gordon Brown's watch would be an electoral disaster that would make HBOS look like a broken piggy bank.
As to the original question, considering many channels are already in the Sky basic package and don't see a fat lot from it, one might question whether it's worth doing.
What future, then, for £1 million-an-hour entertainment shows such as The X Factor and Britain's Got Talent,
They almost make that prospect sound like it's a bad thing !
Because it is!
Other broadcasters such as BSkyB don't have budgets high enough to pay for £1 million-an-hour shows, as they don't have the viewing figures required to generate the necessary revenue (from advertising and phone votes).
Plus wouldn't ofcom fine them a fortune if they abadonned their licences?
I think there is a mechanism that allows ITV to surrender their PSB licences should they wish to. However this would lose them their (almost) half of Mux 2 (currently carrying the bulk of their channels, though a few +1s are on NGW space) and their 3/103 position in the EPGs.
Given that ITV are looking to sell Mux A (where they could happily broadcast encrypted to a smaller percentage of the population than Mux 1,2 or B) I don't see this happening.
I wonder what ITV would charge for subscription to ITV1-4 and CITV? It would be a very interesting move if it happened - though I don't see it happening...
