ITV abandons the South Bank

I imagine they'll likely keep some of it as office space and perhaps leisure and retail.

Although I think it was clear they bought themselves out of the 56 year lease in order to give themselves more flexibility in what to do with the building. The lease had far too many restrictions.

When planning was granted to redevelop the site last year, a lot of it hinged on ITV remaining on site, so I'd imagine this is going to be a long drawn out process.

As others have mentioned, ITV probably will want to have its own HQ in the future, didn't they look at Chiswick and Stratford at one point?

From a BBC Worldwide perspective, they have got ITV by the wotsits & can ask any price for studio hire of TC's 2&3.

The advantage to BBC Studios is that they've currently got a guaranteed source of income through continuous occupancy, together with reduced overheads.

If they push the prices up too much, they risk ITV leaving, resulting in TC2 and TC3 having no regular occupancy, and therefore no guaranteed levels of income.

Is there a possibility of ITV selling to a developer and then buy back portions of the building in a condominium type deal (like NBC) ? I know condos aren’t typical in the UK but to make it short you own the property (either seperate buildings or shared building), but not the common areas, maintenance and other things are charged for. By owning the spots you can do what you want.

NBC actually despite having 30 Rock built for them in the radio age leased 30 Rock until the mid 90s when they bought about 40-50 floors of the building. The rest are owned by the property management company. Owning the spaces allowed them to completely rebuild their spaces, open floors and build new studios.

We don’t quite have that type of ownership here in the UK.

The closest would be Commonhold which are extremely rare. So rare that most lenders don’t like lending on residential flats that are part of a Commonhold development but that’s for a different website to discuss that aspect.

ITV's decision to sell its South Bank campus site could yield £245m, a big profit on the £56m it paid in 2013, now that it has secured planning consent for a 500ksqft commercial development and 213 homes, according to Liberum analyst estimates pic.twitter.com/KTfLV8jKqo

— Louisa Clarence-Smith (@LouisaClarence) October 9, 2018

Planning permission increases the price hugely. Once you've been given it once for a site, new owners are about 99% guaranteed to get it again.
I always had a feeling that ITV had no real intention of returning.

Wasn't the intention to maintain some working studio space there after the rebuild takes place? Has that now changed?

EDIT: I just went back a few pages, I see money was too tempting.

London has now permanently lost studio facilities. I wonder if some commercial entity will consider building new studios somewhere to make up the shortfall? I could imagine someone like Netflix or YouTube thinking about it, as a revenue stream, and for their own uses in the future?

The office space in Waterhouse Square is very much surplus to Skype's requirements nowadays. When I worked there, they reduced their office requirements from 3 floors down to 1, before moving in with Microsoft over in Kingdom Street in Paddington (Nokia's old UK base) and subletting to ITV.

I can't see that Microsoft would have a desire to move back in given they've scaled down the UK Skype operation massively.

It's not BBC Studios or BBC Worldwide, the studios are run by BBC Studioworks

Yes, but only for the daytime shows, and two of the 'studios' were office space

This decision today just probably takes out TC2 and TC3 for a bit longer. It doesn't reduce the studio pool from what there is today. Riverside reopens next year which will add a much needed studio.

The likes of Netflix and YouTube don't need TV studios. Their productions use film techniques, so use 4 wallers and sound stages