Over the past year some of the industry’s biggest names have provided evidence to MPs on the culture select committee, painting a grim picture of the struggles of the UK’s public service broadcasters – such as ITV, the BBC and Channel 4 – to fund the kind of high-end TV dramas that viewers now take for granted in the streaming era.
For nearly a decade after the international rollout of the streaming giants, led by Netflix in 2012, the industry feasted on huge investment in the battle to build a content arsenal of expensive shows to build global scale, which dramatically inflated the production costs of high-end TV shows in particular.
The financial challenges facing the UK’s domestic broadcasters were laid bare on Thursday when figures from the British Film Institute revealed that the amount they spent on premium TV shows costing at least £1m an hour to make plunged last year by a quarter to the lowest level since 2015.
From the star of the Golden Globe-winning series Wolf Hall taking a major pay cut, to the BBC shelving premium TV projects due to a lack of funds, UK broadcasters are increasingly being priced out of the Netflix-fuelled golden age of big-budget drama.
UK broadcasters, already struggling under high-end TV production costs of as much as £5m an hour, have tightened commissioning spend amid an advertising downturn and significant cost increases due to soaring UK inflation.
