Battle stations

NOW that Trade Secretary Stephen Byers has decided to allow a lightly regulated free-for all decide the outcome of the Carlton, United News and Granada merger/takeover battle, stand by for a season of frenzied media speculation about winners and losers in the great ITV game show.

Is Granada's Gerry Robinson sitting in his splendid Donegal rectory plotting an endgame to be executed by his colleague Charles Allen in Manchester and resulting in Granada being the only company left standing when the music stops? Will Granada launch a bid for Carlton or United? Or will it be content merely to snap up Meridian after the latter has been cut loose, as required by Byers?

And then there are the fascinating human interest angles. Large egos are in play here - real "clash of the moguls" stuff. How will Carl-ton's Michael Green adjust to the transition? What will happen to the Daily Express and its doughty editor, Rosie Boycott, in the new media order? And what will Lord Hollick say to his friends in New Labour after being so comprehensively shafted by young Byers?

The parochialism which is the curse of British journalism will be much in evidence as these stirring stories are told. What's happening to ITV may be riveting to London-based media folk, but it's a sideshow by global - or even Continental - standards. Next week, a new media conglomerate, RTL Group, launches itself on the London stock market. This is a collaboration between Pearson and two huge European groups - Albert Frre of Belgium and Bertelsmann of Germany - and its predicted market capitalisation will make it bigger than any purely home-grown outfit. Indeed, even if Granada Media eventually scoops the ITV pool, it's likely to be smaller than RTL. And close inspection of the plans for RTL flotation suggests that it is holding shares back in anticipation of making an acquisition soon.

Watch this space.

After decades of comparative stability, the UK broadcasting world has become very turbulent and unstable. The main drivers of change are digital technology, changes in the regulatory framework and the market.

The new technology is profoundly disruptive because, like the worm in an apple, it destroys from within.

Broadcasting is, by definition, a fewto-many process. Analogue television was a mass medium because that was the only thing the technology could deliver. And there could only be a few broadcasters because that was all the frequency spectrum could handle.

Digital, in contrast, enables the provision of many more discrete channels within the same chunk of spectrum and makes narrowcasting - the transmission of specialised programmes to much more segmented audiences - possible. The rise of subscription, pay-per-view and specialised narrowcasting is already having dramatic effects on the old transmission model. That does not mean that broadcasting will fade away. There will always be occasions and programmes for which the few-to-many model applies - from royal funerals to fly-on-the- wall documentaries about the Prime Minister's press secretary.

But the days when broadcast television was the dominant communications medium are ending.

Digital technology is subversive also because it fuses things which were hitherto separate. Once, the only way of receiving television signals was via the ether; now they often come via a coaxial cable. In a couple of years they will come down telephone land lines and mobile phones. At the moment, most people access the internet via a personal computer, modem and telephone line.

But some people also surf the web and send email via a box which sits atop their TV sets.

"Convergence" is the word that describes this phenomenon. It has acquired the status of Holy Grail in media circles. The desire to harness convergence is what is driving the consolidation of media companies into vast, multimedia conglomerates embracing film, television, broadcasting, narrow-casting and the internet. It is also what is driving governments and the European Union to rethink the whole system within which television and media companies operate, with the aim of bringing them within a single regulatory framework.

At present, for example, the Blair administration is hard at work on a Communications White Paper which is expected to be published in the autumn.

The most significant thing about this is that, whereas previous White Papers on broadcasting matters were the sole responsibility of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, the new document is a joint endeavour of DCMS and the Department of Trade and Industry - the body responsible for telecommunications, spectrum and industrial competition.

What that suggests is that the old regulatory partitions which assigned telecoms and competition to one watertight compartment and broadcasting to another are about to be torn down. At the moment, the telecoms industry is regulated by Oftel, while television is supervised by the ITC and the BBC governors.

This is almost certain to change. To Messrs Robinson, Allen, Green and Hollick, "convergence" means the prospect of big bucks somewhere down the line. To the Government, however, it means a single, all- powerful regulator - Ofcom. Who knows? He might even be a match for Granada.

Copyright 2000
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.