By Roz Morris, Managing Director, TV News London Ltd
Do you still settle down to watch your TV in the evenings or are you glued to your laptop or tablet or phone watching videos and social media content? Or are you gaming and not watching any TV programmes or videos at all? Do you even have a television?
Even if you are watching your television, what sort of programmes are you watching?
Many people of all ages are now no longer watching traditional TV channels at all or, if they do watch specific programmes, they record them. They definitely don’t watch in what is now called a linear fashion i.e sticking with one channel all evening. They prefer to dot about using different broadcast and streaming services. We have so much choice that the business model of traditional TV is under great threat.
There has been a sharp decline in traditional TV viewing, and it shows no signs of stopping, as reported by Ofcom.
We’ve come an awful long way from when TV first started with one channel, the BBC, then moved to two with ITV, three with BBC2 and four and five with Channel 4 and Channel 5. When there was less TV, we all had to watch whatever the channels put on and there were huge audiences in 1970’s to 1990’s of more than 20 million for popular programmes like Morecambe and Wise, This is Your Life and some Eastenders and Coronation Street episodes to name just a few mega hits.
An article in The Times recently pointed out that reviewers of Jilly Cooper’s ‘Riders’ had fixated on naked tennis and missed the point of the plot which is about the awarding of regional ITV licences in fictional Rutshire. In the 1960’s Roy Thomson, the owner of Scottish Television, famously described his franchise as “a licence to print money”. He said this when ITV companies were very profitable due to their monopoly of television advertising and his remark was frequently quoted for decades.
Now those days are very long gone.
In a sign of changing times, it’s important to note that that neither the BBC nor ITV commissioned Rivals. It’s on Disney+ . The streaming services now have the big money.
For ITV, for which there are currently rumours of possible takeover bids, the best route for profits is to stick to commissioning “high-end” dramas that sell internationally.
Even Mr Bates vs the Post Office was not what they wanted, according to the ITV boss Kevin Lygo, who has revealed that, despite being ITV’s most-watched show of 2024, “Mr Bates has made a loss of something like £1 million and we can’t continually do this”.
Now, as Steven D Wright points out in his Times article, despite the fact the UK television industry generated about £3.9 billion in revenue in 2022, behind the scenes in 2024 our TV industry is now in terminal decline. He cites examples of TV production staff forced to take up other jobs because TV programme commissioners ‘now only want high-end drama or low-budget reality filler. They don’t want the rest — what they call ‘the middle’.”
This ‘middle’ is a mixture of unscripted TV genres including lifestyle, gardening, property, daytime and comedy. However despite their popularity, and the fact this is where new stars and big international hits can be developed, channels are now not commissioning new ideas and are relying on old hits such as Gogglebox (11 years old) and The Repair Shop (seven years old) means there is a growing void with no new ideas to fill these slots. (You can read more in the Times here)
In TV, novelty has always been the key to commissioning hits. As channels refuse to green-light new ideas, the industry has shrunk. And with a drop of about £400 million in revenue, independent production companies are folding every week, while, according to the latest figures from the Bectu trade union, 68 per cent of freelance TV workers (the thousands of researchers, editors, producers and directors who make the shows) are unemployed.
When ITV companies made big profits this allowed them to provide regional TV news and documentary programmes. The print news industry also flourished before the advent of the internet and the siphoning off of their advertising from print to the internet. Now both ITV and the BBC have slimmed down their regional news coverage and cut back on broadcast news journalists.
For print the story is even worse. Local news has completely vanished in some parts of the UK, now termed ‘news deserts’ and many younger people don’t engage with traditional news outlets at all.
As a recently published House of Lords report’ The Future of News’ puts it: ‘The risk of a “two tier” media environment in the UK is growing. The economics of mass market journalism are worsening, trust is low, and a growing number of people actively avoid mainstream reporting. News enthusiasts will remain well served. But a growing proportion of society will have limited engagement with professionally produced news, and the gap is widening.
‘These trends are being exacerbated by the impact of generative AI tools, which can create engaging news summaries and provide tech firms with unprecedented influence over the type of news we see.’
The report warns that a failure to tackle these issues could be “irreversible”, and concludes: “There is a realistic possibility of the UK’s news environment fracturing irreparably along social, regional and economic lines within the next 5–10 years. The implications for our society and democracy would be grim.” You can read more here
Meanwhile in another demonstration of the changing nature of television production, the award -winning BBC broadcaster Mishal Husain has announced that she is leaving the corporation after 26 years as a radio and TV broadcaster. She is not going to work for another traditional broadcaster she is joining Bloomberg, the influential provider of financial news, analytics and information, to host a series of top business interviews for them.
For her, the future is not in traditional TV and it seems it isn’t for the rest of us either.
