As the UK's commercial network ITV continues to bleed money, thanks to the fragmentation of the UK TV audience and several ill-advised ventures, most notably a disastrous attempt to compete with Rupert Murdoch's BSkyB in a digital "multichannel" war, rumors are afoot of some sort of realignment of ITV, not-for-profit (but commercial) Channel 4 and RTL-owned Channel 5--ITV itself has thrown out a merger of the three nets, while others have talked about C4 and C5 merging and others have suggested making C4 a non-commercial entity that would compete with the Beeb as a public service broadcaster (which would probably force it to send "Big Brother" to another network) while relieving ITV and C5 of their "public service broadcasting" requirements (requiring certain amounts of news, public affairs, educational and cultural programming, although some cultural programming is honored more in the promise than the breach these days) to compete with BSkyB, which doesn't have those limits (although Murdoch does have Sky News, along with the Beeb's 24-hour domestic news channel and the C-SPANish BBC Parliament, CNN International, MSNBC, Al Jazeera English and--ahem--Fixed Noise in his channel lineup):
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/organgrinder/2009/feb/25/itv-merger-comment --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ TV or Not TV .... Smart (TV) People on Ice! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
