U.K. TV giant ITV sees the fact that Hollywood and other media giants are increasingly keeping their content for their own streaming services as a chance for its ITV Studios production arm, CEO Carolyn McCall said on Wednesday.
“People (are) taking back their catalogs – if you are Disney, you have taken everything back, if you are Warners, you have taken everything back, you just name it, every single company that produces content has taken all their content back to do their own streaming, which means that streamers always need content,” she said during a press call after the company’s mid-year financial update. “It is a big beast, and they got to feed it.”
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Even though Netflix produces its own content, productions take years to develop and execute, she noted. “We are in a very strong position to take advantage, to continue to take advantage of the content growth globally.”
McCall was also asked about the so-called “pingdemic” in Britain, the fact that hundreds of thousands have been pinged by the national health service’s coronavirus app and asked to quarantine after contact with people who became infected. “I would be lying if I said it was not a difficult” situation,” she said, highlighting worries for productions about losing crew and cast. “You don’t want to lose anybody to isolation, because you are filming constantly.”
She concluded though: “It is a worry, but so far we are managing it and mitigating it.”
McCall said ITV has talked to the government about possible exceptions “for certain aspects of production,” which are unlikely to be decided on before mid-August though. “For me, news and daytime are the two really critical areas that … are providing a really key service to viewers,” she explained without sharing further details.
Asked about the planned privatization of Britain’s Channel 4 and suggestions the government was hoping a player like ITV could possibly buy the TV company, McCall declined to comment, saying she was “not going to speculate.”
