shame for the workers but
ITV should close. it only makes crap. Just turning it on knocks 20 points off your IQ
ITV to sell Friends Reunited, axe 600 jobs
Broadcaster ITV is slashing 600 jobs and looking to sell its Friends Reunited and Scoot websites after reporting a net loss of £2.55bn last year. “Current conditions in the advertising market are the most challenging I have experienced in over 30 years in UK broadcasting,” said chairman Michael Grade. “This is reflected both …
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Wednesday 4th March 2009 13:29 GMT Steven Jones
Doomed
The whole ITV business model is doomed. Free-to-air financed by advertising with an effective monopoly was all very well in the days before multi-channel, the Internet. It was the huge sums of money from that which financed programs like The World at War and Brideshead Revisited (and no, they were not originally BBC programs, whatever some twits on the Internet think).
However, in the days of media fragmentation (which includes the Internet) and PVRs so the audience can skip over the ads, then that model is increasingly broken. They can't afford to make really high quality programs any more as there isn't the audience to attract the advertisers (who also realise people are skipping the ads anyway). The UK audience base isn't really big enough to justify the type of commercial production and resale that the Americans can manage.
In the UK, only the BBC, protected by revenue from a tax on receiving equipment is able to fund the production of high quality content.
This has been a long, slow decline and it will continue, only accelerated by the current downturn. Expect more cheaply made programs, and more which can be financed by phone-in revenues. C4 & C5 are going to be hit the same way. ITV's golden age of the 70s & 80s are long gone, and ITV was outflanked by Murdock and his evil empire.
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Wednesday 4th March 2009 13:52 GMT Stef
@ Charlie Barnes
"Paris, because her show is the perfect example of the utter dross on ITV these days along with TV Burp and Saturday Night Takeaway."
No, you made a mistake there. You accidentally added the only two watchable shows on the channel into your Paris comment.
TV Burp does an excellent job at mocking the utter shite on TV, and Takeaway is a harmless exercise in Z-list celebrity spotting "Who the hell is she?" is our common response to the introduction of a 'celebrity' on the show.
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Wednesday 4th March 2009 21:17 GMT Anonymous Coward
Back in the day
World in Action was an internationally renowned documentary series. The consumerist "tonight" hasn't got a candle on it.
Same with ITV news. ITN run C4 news, so they have shown that can do it properly, but ITV news just seems to be tabloid trivial celeb nonsense and sensationalism with a bit of real world doom and gloom thrown in bite size chunks.
TV Burp is fantastic, well said Stef. The surrealist comedy of Harry Hill on a mainstream channel mocking the stream of soaps. OK he's not quite Charlie Brooker, but he is randomly comical.
ITV these days is phone-in vote celeb and low brow nonsense.
Thank goodness though that they lost the F1 to the beeb, though annoyed that they are going to axe the local motorsport and rallying programme. Hopefully though they'll get rid of the local weatherman with his obscure "weather watcher" town riddles. (A prohibition on horse feed == Strabane wtf?)
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Wednesday 4th March 2009 21:17 GMT Martin
They don't understanfd web 2.0!
> Paid £120M .. six months to June last year the website pulled in revenues of £10m,
> down £1m on the same a period in 2007.
So they paid £120M for a business that was making £22M a year and is now making £20M/year = a 15% return, and this is the bit they are getting rid of ?
That seems to make a lot more sense than Google/MS buying a non-profit making/no-ads social networking site for $umpteen-billion.
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Wednesday 4th March 2009 21:17 GMT Anonymous Coward
A good thing happened.....
....ITV lost the franchise for F1 grand prix racing. It was a right royal pain in the defacating device to be watching grown men go round and round a bendy track waiting for the moment of excitement when they dived into the pits to ...... trigger the adverts.
I never did understand the ITV model of trying to fit adverts into grand prix races. Surely they could have had the addies running throughout the race in some sort of split screen arrangement? Like addies in the bottom half of the screen or something? Or maybe have some sort of digital subscription where you could pay money to do away with the addies altogether?
And what will I do without FRU? Same as last week and the week before that I expect.
Re: Paris because although I'm not sure about her being a friend, I sure as heck would like to get united!
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Wednesday 4th March 2009 21:17 GMT Anonymous Coward
The smallest shock since people wised up to AOL and DSG
ITV have been churning out shite for years now. When we were in the economic good times they gave us Celebrity Wrestling and that thing with Philip Schofield that got pulled after just one episode. Now the recession has come so what do they expect? They should have been putting things right years ago but the just sat there and did nothing. I thought when Michael Grade jumped ship it was a sign that the corner was turning, but he's done nowt either. He gave a big talk about having zero tolerance over waste and scandal, but the moment the beloved Ant & Dec were caught out he swallowed his words.
I wonder how much is down to ITV management simply losing the plot, and how much is down to Sky buying a chunk of them and deliberately using their influence to ruin the channel so that Sky benefitted?
ITV used to be regarded by the average Brit as a major network that rivalled the BBC, while Channel 4 and 5 were minority channels for the more niche shows. Now I think people see ITV as more on par with Freeview channels like Virgin One, Dave and Sky Three than BBC1.
The only time they do well now is when they show a Simon Cowell show or that jungle thing, but that accounts for an hour per week for a few weeks of the year, hardly enough to sustain an entire 24-hour network.
And while the other ITV channels can be good in small doses, they're hardly going to upstage the BBC with them by showing old repeats of 70s cop shows and cheesy sci-fi/fantasy shows where the aliens all wear rayon flares without irony.
My worry is that ITV will go cap in hand to the government and beg them to force the BBC to make more tripe of their own so that ITV has a chance to compete.
Paris, because her new ITV show fits right in with whatever else they're showing these days...
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Thursday 5th March 2009 10:33 GMT Anonymous Coward
Cost cutting idea
If they really want to save money, why not get rid of ITV 2, ITV 2+1, ITV 3 etc. and just have one ITV channel?
I blame the Tories for this anyway, if they hadn't allowed meja companies to buy up each other we would still have quality regional broadcasting. If a franchise owner wasn't keeping up with the standard required they would loose out to another bidder at the next renewal date.
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Thursday 5th March 2009 12:26 GMT Anonymous Coward
Quizmania
Does anyone else think ITV's best chance here is to bring back Quizmania with such lovely presenters as Debbie King and Greggles? I'm sure if they put that on ITV1 in a primtime evening slot they'd slaughter Doctor Who and anything else the BBC could come up with. And it would make lots of money.
It's truely is criminal that the excelent Brian Dowling and the other one whose name I forget now haven't been back on ITV since The Mint finished.
PS. Didn't Jayne Sharp age! She looked so youthful in Wudya Cudya back in the golden age of ITV but now she's like Patsy from Absolutely Fabulous. Know what I mean?
This topic is closed for new posts.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
