Flogging Channel 4 won’t bring about the longed-for British reply to Netflix

theguardian.com:

Let’s try to take the government’s case for privatising Channel 4 at face value. It runs something like this: far from being motivated by revenge for critical coverage, ministers are aiming to ensure the channel thrives in the long-term.

According to this line of thinking, Channel 4, despite its healthy-looking record surplus of £74m in 2020, is in danger of being crushed by Netflix, Amazon Prime et al in the new era of subscription and streaming. It relies on advertising income and, under its current remit, can’t produce programmes in-house. Look forward a decade and the sums spent with independent UK producers could dwindle. What worked in the past doesn’t guarantee success in the future.

There are probably two key government texts that have sketched out this thesis, and neither came from Nadine Dorries, the culture secretary who was shockingly uninformed about Channel 4’s financing when appearing before MPs last year. One was a speech by John Whittingdale, as media minister, last September when he said that, at some point, Channel 4 would need cash to grow and that only the private sector could be expected to provide. He offered a vision of the best of both worlds: a remit that protects independent news and regional production but adds deeper pockets.

A spin on a similar theme was offered by Andrew Griffith, the former Sky finance director who is now head of the No 10 policy unit, in a column in the Daily Telegraph last year. He said Channel 4’s “next, and most enduring, contribution to the UK media landscape may be to keep some of its distinctive remit but as part of adding useful scale to another UK-based operator”.

These analyses also tend to contain a strong strain of regret that the UK doesn’t have a streaming