Ofcom Back ITV Regional Cost Cutting
After months of the British public telling Ofcom they like local ITV, the regulator put profit above viewers once more.
You just have to tune to the BBC’s Your News each week to see people complaining that local programming isn’t regional enough, isn’t relevant to them. Viewers want better local programmes, better local news.
However under the guise of the need to cost cut, ITV once more have been allowed to sabotage the regional structure of the network. The next phase will see ITV claim viewers no longer want to watch local news. They of course will switch off in their droves as the news from ITV in the regions becomes even less relevant to most people.
Ofcom stated this morning that ITV should be an essentially national commercial network but should retain a “modest but important public service commitment” to news and some regional content.
While Ofcon said that the ITV local network was increasingly becoming unsustainable they seemed to ignore the fact that some of the better performing regions are those not owned by ITVplc;namely STV North, STV South and UTV – companies who have not been deliberatly wrecking the local structure over the past ten years by showing cheap, uninteresting – and quite often not very local programming in the ITV regional slots. Slots which have been placed against high rating BBC soaps or late at night.
The changes to start in February this year will see seventeen local news programmes reduced to nine. It includes the merger of Border and Tyne Tees Television and HTV West with Westcountry.
Ofcom estimates that by 2012, when the analogue signal will be switched off, an extra £145-235 million of funding will be needed to keep public service broadcasts at current levels on non-licence fee funded commercial networks.
ITV don’t want to continue with any of their current Pubic Service commitments at all but want all the benefits that the high profile PSB slot provides. It is quite simple, ITVplc wish their ‘ITV1’ to be another Living TV or Sky One. The right thing to do would be to hand back their PSB licence, and leave the ITV Network. It is of course good news for the BBC who, unlike ITV have continued with good audience shares and popular regional programming, again, proving viewers enjoy local programming.
Ofcom yet again, cronies of Labour, prove how utterly useless to the British public they are. Ofcom and the Government have of course been allowing this decline for over a decade.
A Facebook group for disgruntled regional ITV viewers can be found here.
Meanwhile Ofcom have ruled out the BBC licence fee being used to cover public service programming on other commercial networks, but a possible merger between Channel 4 and Five could still happen.