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The ongoing difficulties faced by the U.K.’s public service broadcasters could be partially alleviated by a dramatic merger between two of the four main players, the BBC and Channel 4.
Speaking at the RTS London Convention,
Sony Pictures Television’s international production chief Wayne Garvie argued that for Channel 4 — the publicly-owned, commercially-funded network struggling with declining advertising income and rising costs — to survive, it should become part of the main national broadcaster.
“My view is that you put Channel 4 as the commercial arm of the BBC, doing public service commercial channels and bringing them together, and then Channel 4 could have its own identity,” he said on a panel entitled The View From Our Window alongside Roku U.K. head Richard Halton and Hearst Network’s U.K. manager and EMEA chief creative officer Heather Jones.
“That’s what I would I do. I think it’ll probably happen, because frankly it’s very difficult to see how Channel Four survives in its present form. And it’s not it’s fault. It’s that the market is changing in every conceivable moment.”
A potential merger between the BBC and Channel 4, which would be a monumental shakeup in the U.K. TV industry, has been mooted before. Back in 2024, reports emerged that the idea was being discussed, a move that at the was claimed would add more than $1.3 billion to the BBC’s coffers and enable Channel 4’s to cut costs, free up budget to be spent on commissioning new programmes and use its profits to subsidise other parts of the BBC.
According to The Guardian, another reported model was for Channel 4 — which several years ago was under threat of privatisation by the then Conservative government — to operate as a semi-independent entity under BBC Studios, the BBC’s for-profit arm.
At the time, a BBC spokesperson said there were “no ongoing discussions” about the merger of the BBC and Channel 4 “nor are we developing a proposal to do so.”
