ITV Boss, Sky’s Content Chief Set Out Vision for Acquisition, Try to Calm Nerves: ‘The Competition is Ferocious’

With Comcast-owned Sky’s $2.1 billion acquisition of ITV currently winding its way through the regulatory process in the U.K., both parties are limited in how much they can say. Yet Sky’s content chief Cecile Frot-Coutaz and ITV CEO Carolyn McCall, both speaking in separate keynote speeches at the Royal Television Society convention in London, managed to say quite a lot about what the deal means for the U.K.

Read on for their comments on key aspects of the deal including content and news…

How the deal happened…

Frot-Cotaz and McCall both acknowledged the television landscape has shifted immeasurably over the past decade. McCall said the Sky/ITV acquisition “wouldn’t have gone through” even six years ago, with the Competition and Markets Authority taking a much more bullish approach to consolidation in the past.

“The transaction is very much a response to what’s happened in the marketplace,” Frot-Cotaz said. But she added, Sky are not just acquiring ITV to create a “robust” media company: “we think there’s a lot of opportunity in it as well.”

Five years ago there was 200,000 hours of streaming content available to audiences – that has now more than doubled to 900,000, a figure that doesn’t include YouTube, said the ITV boss. “That’s what we’re up against.”

Content is still king…

Both Frot-Coutaz and McCall said Sky was committed to ITV content, not least because the deal terms include a content supply agreement with ITV Studios.

“One of the most important things to Sky was our content,” McCall said in an attempt to allay fears amongst indie produces that cost savings will result in less money going into content. “There’ll be more content because the sum of the two.”

In her keynote Frot-Coutaz agreed: “The goal ultimately is to maintain the scale of the content offering.”

Investment in tech…

“The competition is ferocious,” McCall said. “It’s not just [being] bigger; it’s also the investment. So you have to invest in technology. You’ve got to continue to invest in AI. You’ve got to continue to invest in efficiency, and most importantly, you’ve got to have to enough money to constantly invest in content, because content is where it’s at. That’s what makes you all your money.”

Frot-Coutaz echoed that. “Content is super important, but you also need the technology that goes with it.”

But technology costs money and for money you need scale. Hence the deal.

Commitment to news…

A key concern around the acquisition is whether Sky will seek to consolidate its newsroom with ITV’s. While ITV’s public service broadcasting commitments — which includes nations, regional and national news — are protected until 2034, there is a large question mark over what will happen after that day.

McCall said that ITN, which makes ITV’s news (it operates under a shared-ownership scheme comprised of four stakeholders, one of which is ITV) is a “strong news organization” so asked “why would you duplicate?”

Frot-Coutaz maintained that Sky has made a “very public commitment to maintain Sky News and to maintain ITN news” but refused to say whether that commitment would extend past 2034, when ITV’s public service broadcast license expires.

Whether that will allay fears remains to be seen. Watch this space.