According to last week’s Broadcast, ITV wants to substantially reduce its children’s programming from the current eight hours a week to as little as two hours a week – an hour each on Saturday and Sunday.
The reason is simply that ITV isn’t competing in the teatime market at the moment with Deal or No Deal and a combination of Richard & Judy and Paul O’Grady killing them in that timeslot.
The argument goes that with CITV now running, kids can be served in the multi-channel world with programming that better serves them on their own channels.
This is such a stupid argument it nearly makes the English Cricket Board (ECB) handing all their cricket rights to Sky seem sensible. What ITV doesn’t seem to understand is that as soon as ITV comes off the schedule for kids, they might never see them again. Yes, we do live in a multi-channel world, and it’s a world where, although ITV might be in position three at the moment, in the future that position is going to be less and less important.
ITV is still in the position of having the good fortune to have one of four slots that have full national coverage across the UK, and in return for making money from this scarce spectrum resource, a certain amount of public service requirements is essential. If ITV isn’t able to make that spectrum pay, then they can quite easily become a digital-only channel and hand the analogue spectrum over to someone else who could make it work.
Far from giving a short-term boost to ITV in a timeslot that they’ve so far proved creatively incapable of filling anyway (repeats of Paul O’Grady against his new show on C4 and The Price is Right), they might want to consider that future generations won’t actually see ITV as anything more important than “just another channel” on the dial.
The reason for this is largely down to the impending revenue loss that’s likely to stem from regulation on food advertising.
There’s also the suggestion that since Saturday morning kids programming has moved from BBC1 to BBC2, it’s a small step to move it completely across to CBBC. I don’t forsee this at all. There’s no commercial pressure to do this and what exactly is BBC2 dying to show in its place? Old films? Essentially the kids programming and food programming have just swapped.
What I find strange is that even from a commercial point of view, these companies are so short-sighted. If you manage to create a character as popular as, say, Bob The Builder, the tertiary rights you’re going to make from everything from toys to birthday cakes to duvet covers is going to make it worthwhile making the show at a complete loss. Isn’t that the model that many of the US cartoons of the eighties worked on. Indeed, even today, I suspect that many imported cartoon programming is offered at minimal cost because the toy manufacturers are going to clean up when a hit show takes off.
It’s worth noting that even US stations all have to air at least three hours of kids programming albeit that they often sub-let their airtime to kids cable channels.