ITV chief executive, Dame Carolyn McCall, has said the Government does not understand what public service broadcasting (PSB) consolidation would actually look like.
The comments come after the UK Government asked the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), with support from broadcasting regulator Ofcom, to assess partnership opportunities and possible consolidation between PSBs as a way to remain competitive against streaming sites and digital platforms.
Speaking about the idea of merging PSBs at the Royal Television Society (RTS) Convention in Cambridge on Thursday, Dame Carolyn said: “Consolidation takes many forms and I think there will be consolidation. But I think when the Government talks about consolidation in our industry, they don’t really mean, I don’t think, between PSBs, they mean collaboration.
“And we’ve demonstrated that we collaborate.
“Each one of us has a very different business model. I’m owned by shareholders, I’m a PLC, therefore, I have a duty to my audiences, but also to my shareholders.
“When you talk about intra consolidation, it would mean the government’s having to buy ITV effectively, buying out our shareholders.
“That’s the only way you would see intra-media consolidation with PSBs.”
Her comments were echoed by the heads of the BBC, Channel 4 and Paramount (owner of Channel 5) with BBC director-general, Tim Davie, saying that he does not believe merging completely would be good for the “UK ecosystem”.
Sarah Rose, president of Channel 5 and UK regional lead at Paramount said: “Got to be careful not to let TV market smaller by shrinking it too much.
“I think plurality is the word that we all land on here, but the joy of this market that allows the four of us to sit here all these decades later and defend and lobby for it to continue to be defended, is that we cater to audiences with a plurality of voices.
“And if you go to a single buying point or a single channel, you’re going to lose that and it will be much harder to defend the ecosystem that we are so keen to protect.
“That doesn’t mean that you can’t share CDN costs, metadata compliance, of course, the stuff that they were seeing, the boring bits, we definitely want to talk about behind the scenes but the brand, the editorial, the audience focus – what makes this special is the plurality.”
