Broadcasting partnerships… a new dawn?

Our weekly columnist Raymond Snoddy witnessed the UK TV industry getting together yesterday… but only in the sense of being in the same room. “It was just like the good old days with terrestrial broadcasters attacking each other and Sky attacking everyone in sight. There was not a partnership to be seen.”

It was once said of the Irish they are a very honest people. They haven’t got a good word to say about each other.

It was a bit like that at the Institute of Economic Affairs Future of Broadcasting Conference yesterday when some of the top panjandrums settled down to discuss the weighty topic of “building viable and vibrant broadcasting businesses”.

The future was all very well. Mostly they just got down to the job of denouncing one another. For a moment or two it was just like the good old days with terrestrial broadcasters attacking each other and Sky attacking everyone in sight. There was not a partnership to be seen.

Mike Darcey, chief operating officer of BSkyB denounced commercial broadcasters for their touching but costly “blind loyalty” to the free TV model as the world of pay continued to burgeon around them and advertising dropped away. Not one of the commercial terrestrial broadcasters currently has any presence in pay broadcasting at all, he noted.

“After 20 years of continuous growth in pay-TV, that is curious to say the least,” said Darcey, who added it was especially ironic that among the free-to-air terrestrials only the BBC had a presence in pay through UKTV.

But Darcey reserved his special ire for regulator Ofcom, which would like to impose cuts of 30 per cent on the wholesale prices other operators pay for Sky sports and movie channels. It was like industrial planning from the 1970s, spluttered Darcey.

It was a proposal for Sky to subsidise rivals like BT or Virgin Media and don’t imagine for a moment that the satellite broadcaster would continue to risk investing £1.3 billion a year in content if such a thing happened.

Ed Richards, chief executive of Ofcom, entered into the spirit of things by telling Sky that BT, Virgin and two other unnamed competitors had all argued for the breaking up of Sky.

Ofcom had rejected that solution as too extreme, implying that poor old Sky had been lucky to get off with a slap on the wrist for daring to develop the market.

Then Michael Grade, on a public platform with Dawn Airey for the first time since Airey decamped from ITV to run FIVE, made it clear that partnership plans with the BBC were as good as over.

The partnership idea to share premises and even local news pictures had seemed like a really promising idea that had largely evaporated on closer examination. Perhaps £7 million of savings by 2016.

“It is disingenuous, to say the least, to hear the BBC still trotting out partnership as an alternative to guarantee plurality,” insisted Grade.

Using some of the BBC’s licence fee to fund regional news was the very thing, said Grade, which would erode accountability and undermine the licence fee. When he was BBC chairman, Grade denounced “top-slicing” as a “fiscal sword of Damocles” hanging over the corporation.

Chairman Roger Bolton later tried to pour petrol on troubled water by suggesting to Caroline Thomson, the BBC chief operating officer, that “disingenuous” meant being deliberately misleading – tantamount to telling porkies really. Thomson told the distinguished journalist and producer he obviously didn’t know what the word meant.

Dawn Airey rose to the occasion by arguing that British broadcasting were as good at partnerships as Silvio Berlusconi. After six months of negotiations between BBC Worldwide and Channel 4 there wasn’t a letter of intent or memorandum of understanding.

“There’s not even a kiss on the cheek,” said Airey whose advances for a Five – Channel 4 merger were spurned.

She was asked whether Five would be around in five years. “More like five months,” hissed a friendly broadcasting rival in my ear.

But once the gags were over it was Airey who came up with more serious ideas for partnership. She warned that the creators and providers of UK content were not so much looking at the perfect storm as staring into the abyss.

Hulu was the biggest success story of the web over the past year. It had succeeded because “three ferociously competitive global media players – Fox, NBC Universal and now Disney-ABC are grown up enough to know there is a time to compete and fight like rats in a sack for audience share and there is a time to put aside your differences and form partnerships that are mutually beneficial,” the FIVE executive argued.

In the UK there was too much mutual distrust combined with regulators unable to fully reflect the long term interests of consumers. Airey also revealed that she was trying to create new partnerships with advertisers. That would mean a bigger emphasis on advertiser-funded content and maybe culture secretary Ben Bradshaw would be less hostile to product placement than his predecessor Andy Burnham.

But whether Grade is now speaking to Airey, let alone interested in any partnership with Five, is as yet unknown.