They did, however, do a public good.
I’m sure Channel 4 loses similar amounts for some of the Dispatches.
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You know it’s free to watch on ITVX, right? It just has ads
You need TV licence, so no, not free.
Not for watching catch-up on ITVX. You do need a TV Licence for the BBC iPlayer, however.
There’s no validation process, even for BBC iPlayer. They ask for a postcode because the regional content within the UK is locked to different countries and regions (ITVX content is on STV player in Scotland).
There isn’t a way for them to check your TV licence on ITVX. Even then a TV licence is only required if you watch the livestream broadcasts on the app. If you watch catch-up, streamed but not live broadcasts, a TV licence isn’t required except for BBC iPlayer. An IP address outside the UK isn’t likely to work either.
I think his point was more the state of broadcast television at the moment. There has been a major advertising slump in UK TV - for example channel 4 is in dire straits, cutting 17% of their workforce, stopping commissioning an holding lots of shows back from broadcast as an accounting ploy to not pay production companies until the next financial year.
ITV on paper are doing much better but to find their biggest hit of the year actually lost money says alot about the state of UK broadcast TV. The first run advertising and the UK streaming catch up money (or fragments of subscriptions to ITVX) haven’t made the show profitable.
Shows now need to be saleable abroad to make money and a show like this just doesn’t sell enough to make profit.
Its bad news because it means ITV and others are less incentivised to make these types of shows and instead retreat back to cheaper shows (reality and quizzes), and stuff that will sell abroad. Stuff that sells abroad is not necessarily bad but it does push to more generic types of TV over culturally important or unique shows that would only appeal here.
There isn’t really a solution to this in the commercial sector. Advertising might bounce back but probably not as that money is now directed at the Internet and social media, not TV.
The BBC could be a champion for this type of stuff but it’s doing badly too as the license fee has not kept up with inflation for years, so it’s having to make very deep cuts to keep as much of its many commitments going as possible.
Meanwhile American streamers including Netflix are gobbling up the market and UK broadcasters can’t compete with the shear scale of their operations.
Personally I think the funding for the BBC needs to go up substantially, and maybe slices of new money even become available for any broadcaster to apply for to ensure culturally important shows can be funded. The commercially viable stuff will always have funding but the more niche and UK specific stuff needs to be protected and probably subsidised to maintain a cultural voice and support diversity in the output of our creative industries.
It’s got to the point in linear television where the only money-makers are sports, and cheap production quiz/reality shows.
Even when you have a drama that captures the nation, it’s tricky to make a profit on it.
I’m sure it’ll bring in some awards too.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
ITV made a loss of about £1m on its agenda-setting drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office, despite it being the UK’s most-watched TV show of the year so far, the broadcaster has revealed.The four-part drama, which aired in January, showed the human toll on hundreds of sub-postmasters who were wrongly prosecuted for false accounting and theft due to faulty software.It sparked an outcry and led to plans for new legislation to clear their names.The series has been watched by 13.5 million people to date.But Kevin Lygo, ITV’s managing director of media and entertainment, said: "Mr Bates has made a loss of something like £1m and we can’t continually do this.
"Broadcasters are facing big financial pressures, and often rely on overseas channels or streamers buying the rights to show a programme to help recoup its budget.Last month, ITV said 12 foreign broadcasters had bought the Mr Bates drama.
But Mr Lygo said it wasn’t sufficiently appealing to foreign viewers to break even.
"Another challenge for mainstream broadcasters is “getting enough audiences to turn up on the night” to watch a show, he said.Five or six years ago, a programme like Mr Bates would have been expected to attract a live audience around six or seven million.
The first episode of Mr Bates was watched by four million on the night, which is as “good as you get” now, he said.It went on to gather steam and viewers.
ITV followed the ratings success by announcing in February a drama about what it calls the “biggest health scandal” in British history, the contaminated blood scandal.
The original article contains 358 words, the summary contains 264 words. Saved 26%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
“If you’re in Lithuania, four hours on the British Post Office? Not really, thank you very much.”
British AF
ITV seem to be so mismanaged. I know money is tight in TV these days but they should at least be breaking even on their big shows.
In my opinion they only occasionally have good shows like this and the rest is a bit crap. Plus ITV X (or whatever it’s called this month) is the worst streaming service app I have ever tried to use.
It doesn’t work on my smart TV. I go to play a show and it loads the ad just fine and then it just crashes.
It’s definitely not the internet it’s just the app is rubbish if you shut it down and restart it it might sometimes work but I can’t honestly be bothered with it. If I actually want to watch an ITV show, it’s infinitely easier to just torrent it and then put it on Plex.
They made an Irvine Welsh detective drama series called Crime. This was excellent. It does seem like most of their dramas are overdone police/detective shows. Crime had great writing and dark humour. But I don’t think it would have been picked up by ITV if it wasn’t a police drama.
