Good news if you’re over 35 and/or like I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here – the UK independent broadcaster, ITV is to invest UK£36 million in its two digital channels, ITV2 and ITV3, by scrapping its plans for a children’s channel and choosing instead to focus on News and its digital offerings.
This means that ITV2 has its programme making budget doubled to UK£24 million, and ITV3 gets UK£13 million for its launch later this year.
ITV2 is going to use that extra cash to buy in American imports to compete with Channel 4 and Sky – so rather than attract an audience with original programming it’s going to buy in the content that the others channels show in the hope that it will somehow wrestle views away from them.
By making the investment, ITV hope to triple their total revenues to UK£150 million (€225 million) by 2007. Net advertising revenues are up 4.9% over this period last year, but viewer share continues to fall.
ITV
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Fraser Lovatt
Fraser Lovatt has spent the last fifteen years working in publishing, TV and the Internet in various capacities, and believes that they will be seperate platforms for at least a while yet. His main interests at the moment are exploring where Linux is taking home entertainment and how technology is conferring technical skills on more and more people.
Fraser Lovatt was born in the same year that 2001: A Space Odyssey was delighting and confusing people in the cinemas, and developed a lifelong love of technology as soon as he realised that things could be taken apart, sometimes put back together again, but mostly left in bits or made into something the original designer hadn't quite planned upon.
At school he was definitely in the ZX Spectrum/Magpie/BMX camp, rather than the BBC Micro/Blue Peter/well-behaved group. This is all deeply ironic as he later went on to spend nine years working at the BBC.
After a few years of working as a bookseller in Scotland, ("Back when it was actually a skilled profession" he'll tell anyone still listening), he moved to England for reasons he can't quite explain adequately to himself. After a couple of publishing jobs punctuated by sporadic bursts of travelling and photography came the aforementioned nine years at the BBC where he specialised in internet technologies and video.
These days his primary interests are Java, Linux, videogames and pies - and if they're not candidates for convergence, then what is?
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