p2pnet news view | TV:- Britain’s Channel 4 is badly in need of a makeover, says a draft of a Digital Britain report.

And that probably means it faces, “being shoe-horned into a new and bigger broadcaster after losing its battle for extra public funding, in the biggest revolution in public service television in a generation,” says the Financial Times.

“This new broadcaster would be in operation by 2012 and, among other things, could have responsibility for providing news programmes as an alternative to the BBC, under one option highlighted in a draft report written by Lord Carter with the help of industry experts,” says the story.

Channel 4 is a public-service television broadcaster in the United Kingdom, centred around a television channel of the same name which began transmissions on 2 November 1982, says the Wikipedia.

“Although entirely commercially self-funded, it is ultimately publicly owned,” it says, going on:

“Originally a subsidiary of the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA), the station is now owned and operated by the Channel Four Television Corporation, a public body established in 1990 for this purpose and which came into operation in 1993, following the abolition of the IBA.

“The station was established to provide a fourth television service to the UK that would break the duopoly of the BBC’s two established television services and the single commercial broadcasting network, ITV, then the only services in the UK.”Structural shifts taking place in media are beyond the control of any single company, The Telegraph has Channel 4 chief executive Andy Duncan saying.

“In this decade to date, the value of internet advertising in the UK has grown from zero to close to £3bn a year,” he says, continuing »»»

The significant majority of that sum goes to a handful of US companies, which have innovated in the development of technology and services but invest almost nothing in UK content.

In the same period TV advertising has contracted by a fifth and may dip below £3bn this year. The majority of TV revenue is reinvested in UK content, but it is no longer possible for broadcasters to generate enough money out of the UK alone to sustain historic levels of investment.

Yet just as Google can access eyeballs and advertising revenues in the UK, so British companies have the opportunity to reach new global markets. And we in Britain have the skills, creative resources and experience to grasp this opportunity – including vitally a huge reservoir of existing content, created in most part by our public service broadcasting culture.

Described in the draft as a “wider entity”, the new station, “could ­resemble a merger of C4 ­and Five, owned by RTL, an idea ­supported this week in an FT article by Mark Thompson, the director-general of the BBC,” says the Financial Times.

Lord Carter, the minister responsible for building a Digital Britain, will say the government, “rejects the idea of funding Channel 4 with money from the BBC licence fee or any other form, according to people who have read the draft report,” says the story, adding:

” ‘Channel 4 completely overplayed its hand and the BBC is the clear winner,’ said a person familiar with the government’s thinking. Channel 4 had appealed for public help after saying that it would be running at a £150m annual loss by 2012.

“The report, due for publication on January 26, also ­proposes new protection for intellectual property with the formation of a ‘rights agency’, a review of ­competition rules affecting local newspapers and extra support for digital radio.”

Financial Times – Channel 4 faces merger into ‘wider entity’, January 15, 2009
The Telegraph – Britain’s media needs radical change to stay on top, January 16, 2009

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This entry was posted on Friday, January 16th, 2009 at 9:22 am and is filed under TV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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