Do Michael Grades sums for ITV add up and Wheres the Popcorn in he TV business?
By Kate Bulkley For Broadcast September 20, 2007 Michael Grade gave us his vision for the future of ITV last week, but the company’s share price edged down in the three days afterwards. Why? Well, the analysts heard not so much a brave new Grade world as a strategy that sounded like Charles Allen mark II with a little Dawn Airey sprinkled on top. Dawn is certainly a powerhouse and it’s a positive move by ITV to embrace the good bits of the ill-fated Iostar plan, ie fire up the content business. And there was a little pot of internet razzmatazz from Grade as well. But at least one analyst said the internet strategy was “impossible to model” given the lack of detail about how the fivefold increase in internet revenues to 150m by 2010 would be achieved. For the City, the plan to close regional news bureaux and save 35m to 40m was also not new. The only change was the timescale, as it seems this will happen sooner than 2012, when most analysts had it pencilled in. But the big concern for t
