ITV warns it could stop being a PSB

[Humphrey Hacker]

If the licences are due for renewal next year it would make sense to scrap the separate 'breakfast licence', to allow whoever operates the Channel 3 licence for the rest of the day to own it (i.e. ITV & STV). Maybe going further and replacing the multiple regional licences with just 5 licences - England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and Channel Islands. I dare say something like this might suit ITV Plc, especially if nation licences allowed them to get away with just one England specific news programme a day (and another couple for Wales & NI) instead of having to produce multiple English regional news programmes.

As others have commented this feels more like positioning themselves ahead of licence renewal negotiations, and deterring any tighter regulations. It's safe to say we're extremely unlikely to see That's TV suddenly occupying the Channel 3 slot.

The weak link in the argument is the Channel Islands. I mean no disrespect to anyone from the Islands but from I've seen Channel's news output struggles to cover 15 minutes let alone 30 (for the record and I don't know if this is still true it was Channel Report at 6 followed by Channel Sport at 6.15)

If ITV ever went down this route then they may subsume the Islands into the mainland and have 4 licences and not 5 with the studios at Jersey and Guernsey closed and transferred to Plymouth.

I must admit I wonder how they managed an hour during the strike! There's been a lot of flack recently for the flipping of all but a handful of the old "second-tier"/"sallie" commercial radio stations, mostly to Greatest Hits Radio - most of them licensed in the New Labour boom years of the late 90's and early 00's. But the truth is, not a lot happens in a lot of these ultra-small TSAs to justify a news service. I've been PD of such a license and worked in programming and news for several more; and back in the day a lot of these licenses were mandated to do extended news and things like that; but not enough happens in the TSA to fill a 2 minute update so how the Hell some of these stations filled 10 minute extended bulletins I'll never know.

From what I know about Channel TV during the strike their efforts bordered on superhuman. It was the closest the UK's had to community television.

I've had some experience with community radio and the news output has been pretty non existent. I was on the air when news came through that Prince had died and had to think on my feet to weave the news in. Fortunately I was able to fall back on my training but many TSA's must struggle terribly.