Wellbeing to be axed

Granada to axe 430 jobs, close Wellbeing

Uk media group Granada is to axe around 430 jobs in a bid to cut costs after revealing that losses at its ailing digital service ITV Digital had dragged the company to a loss of £186m for the year, writes Luke Satchell

Announcing Granada's year-end results, chairman Charles Allen revealed core earnings for the business were down from £294m to £201m year-on-year, with net advertising revenue down 12%. However, the bulk of the company's losses were down to ITV Digital. The digital service reported widening pre-tax and interest losses of £234m, compared to £185m last year, and pushed Granada's overall investment in the service to £394m.

Allen said there would be cuts across ITV Digital, in a bid to reduce costs by £104m in 2002. These would include a reduction in staff costs, including a pay freeze for ITV Digital staff and management. The company is also expected to close its joint -venture digital TV channel with Boots, Wellbeing Network, after the struggling digital TV offering ran up losses of £30 million.

Granada's finance director Henry Staunton admitted that the company's 'absolute top priority' was to solve the ITV Digital problem, which had become an 'extremely sensitive issue'. 'The first option is to take costs out of the business, and there are others', he said.

Staunton also revealed that Granada and Carlton were close to finalising a carriage deal with BSkyB for ITV Sport on the Sky Digital platform. The companies are expected to put pen to paper early next year.

(source: Broadcast)

Good!

I'd hardly call it good - I'd call it bad. It's a shame really.

Im surpised they lasted as long as they did!! Good ridance!

Yeah, you personally might not like the channel, but it doesn't mean nobody else does?

Same when [.tv] closed, quite a lot of people thought it was good, but I for one thought, and still think BSkyB made a big mistake.

I just hope this doesn't mean that Granada make regional ITV staff suffer again for their foolish multichannel experiments. It has happened too many times already, maybe now they are finally learning!

I could have told them that Wellbeing was a crappy project from day one. There simply is not enough of an audience for this kind of channel. It is about time that companies realised that people do not want more TV, they want better TV (to quote the monkey ). Wellbeing fell very squarely into the former. TTTV alone lost 10 members of staff to Wellbeing (who were not replaced), I hope that Granada sees fit to return them to where they'll be useful again!!!

The trouble Wellbeing had was it launched (on Sky at least) just a couple of months after ChannelHealth and Discovery Health. Although WellB's shows were slightly different (more newsy than documentary-format) it's another example of 'works fine as a show but can't stretch to a channel' (see also whereits.at)

I never understood why they didn't try and merge Breeze and Wellbeing into one channel - they ended up axing live programming from both, the former now only has US shows and the latter as you say looks likely to close.

Presumably Yorkshire TV (whose studios it came from) lost out as a result of all this as well..

William