Mergers & Acquisitions Come For ITV

The streaming revolution may have started in the U.S., but the fallout has been felt around the globe. There is very little in the entertainment landscape that hasn’t been affected by internet speeds crossing the invisible threshold from 30 minutes of buffering to watch a two-minute video to streaming on demand. From the sudden uptick in popularity of K-Dramas to TF1 and Canal+ now residing within Netflix and Disney+ respectively in France, every country is transforming.

In the U.K., the only network that was on the ball in making the transition to streaming was the BBC, which launched BBC iPlayer in July 2007, three whole months before Hulu was even officially founded. Both were rooted in the same impetus – YouTube was eating their lunches by being the only mainstream way to stream TV series the morning after they aired. However, Hulu was a consortium – three U.S. networks working together to make a single destination for streaming TV. The BBC was just the BBC (and BBC Two, Three and Four).

Hulu helped carry the three networks that joined it – NBC, ABC and Fox – into the current landscape. (CBS/Viacom, now Paramount, was the only major TV network that did not join, one of the many reasons it was the first to collapse.) But the BBC’s iPlayer launch left the rest of the TV landscape behind. While Channels 4 and 5 have managed to make up ground in recent years, ITV – much older and more established – had a harder time shifting gears. Like Paramount, it is about the head the way of the dodo, with the Comcast-owned pay-TV Sky network absorbing the bulk of the public broadcaster, leaving only its production arm, ITV Studios, for someone else to scoop up.