C4 already cooking up a deal with BBC
After yesterday’s media talkfest in Oxford, you have to wonder who the audience is for this stuff. Is it simply the press?
Media secretary Andy Burnham made it clear that broacasters had to sort out their local difficulties themselves, mainly about funding. Within hours, a solution for C4 had emerged in the form of some quite detailed plans with BBC Worldwide. Those plans have obviously been laid over weeks if not months by the BBC and C4. So it was wrong to believe, last week, that the BBC and C4 were poles apart on this issue. Burnham was already preaching to the converted when he said it made sense for C4 to seek an agreement with BBC Worldwide over its future funding.
The comment by BBC chairman Michael Lyons that the BBC shouldn’t be the Lloyd’s bank of the TV industry already seems less inflammatory. C4 has clearly been talking to the black horse for some time.
This is the key point about any BBC/C4 deal, taken from the MediaGuardian’s story yesterday: “The idea being considered would see BBC Worldwide’s UK operations, which include its 50% stake in the profitable UKTV channels business, its DVD joint venture with Woolworths, which recently collapsed, and its magazines division brought together in a commercial joint venture with Channel 4, and potentially Channel Five.”
So C4, and possibly Five, would get a share of what exactly? According to the latest BBC WW report, the BBC earned more than £83m from programme sales by the UKTV joint ventures and £274.6m from its share of all joint ventures including DVD business 2 entertain with now defunct Woolworths. Sales of magazines generated £177m. Will a slice of all this be enough to keep C4 going in its current form from 2012 onwards?
Answers on a postcard to Stephen Carter, please.
