ITV to cut drama production

Yeh, its getting kind of sad to see ITV now, especially in the light of its recent celebrations of its 50th birthday, where the channel seemed quite happy to promote its quality programming, without seeming to notice that it had cancelled it all many years ago. Quite clearly, the vertical integration of the old regional broadcasters into a single unit, and more recently, the diversification into several digital channels has been pretty disastrous.
I think BBC1 is still holding on pretty well to its ratings even in the digital world, but ITV1's ratings are sinking.

I think the main reason this should interest us is the hilarious set of paragraphs:

'At the time, ITV's director of TV, Simon Shaps, said he wanted the broadcaster to "take more risks" and spend its drama budget on "contemporary, less predictable" programmes.

The broadcaster says it will review the future of one-off documentaries and wildlife programmes, and wants to establish more long-running entertainment formats, such as I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here' or X Factor.'

Clearly, a channel which wants to "take more risks" cannot square itself with attempting to create more programmes like "I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here". But of course, its not trying to. Still, ignoring the ridiculous empty PR, what we can learn from this is that ITV is moving away from the creation of high-quality media content (dramas, wildlife and documentary productions that, back in the day, it was very good at) to the creation of strong formats.

Presumably this is a move to help the sale of these formats internationally (i.e. ITV is attempting to move to the production of empty templates, as it will hold the intellectual property rights to them), which perhaps it sees as a more viable future.

Now this should worry us, I think because we're principally interested in producing high quality media content, rather than templates. So a move by one of the major players in British television down this road is a big concern, I think.

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