Monkey Business
BBC Two's programme Monkey Business, on Wednesday, June 12, looks at the inside story of the collapse of ITV Digital.
An award-winning relaunch campaign, involving a mascot called Monkey, could not halt to decline of ITV Digital and the company went into administration. eventually the plug was pulled, owing the Football League £179 million and leaving a million customers without a service for the digital boxes on top of their television sets.
ITV chiefs Michael Green and Charles Allen had made the mistake of taking on the most powerful man in British broadcasting - Rupert Murdoch. A catalogue of disasters followed the launch of their digital platform. Their home-grown channels were no match for BSkyB's movies and sport. In desperation they looked for something else. That something else was football and ITV Digital was forced to pay £35 million for the rights to non-Premiership football, with disastrous consequences.
Ten years earlier, in the same office building, British Satellite Broadcasting (BSB) had taken on Sky with the same disastrous consequences. The programme asks: is the British television establishment so hell-bent on keeping Murdoch out that it cannot learn from its own mistakes?
(From NeiT via email)
An award-winning relaunch campaign, involving a mascot called Monkey, could not halt to decline of ITV Digital and the company went into administration. eventually the plug was pulled, owing the Football League £179 million and leaving a million customers without a service for the digital boxes on top of their television sets.
ITV chiefs Michael Green and Charles Allen had made the mistake of taking on the most powerful man in British broadcasting - Rupert Murdoch. A catalogue of disasters followed the launch of their digital platform. Their home-grown channels were no match for BSkyB's movies and sport. In desperation they looked for something else. That something else was football and ITV Digital was forced to pay £35 million for the rights to non-Premiership football, with disastrous consequences.
Ten years earlier, in the same office building, British Satellite Broadcasting (BSB) had taken on Sky with the same disastrous consequences. The programme asks: is the British television establishment so hell-bent on keeping Murdoch out that it cannot learn from its own mistakes?
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