Why a Sky–ITV Merger Must Never Happen

Because this isn’t a creative play, it’s a Wall Street one.

Every few years, the television industry rediscovers the same idea: that the only way to survive is to get bigger. It usually begins with an exciting-sounding press release about “competing in the global marketplace” or “aligning with audience behaviours.” This time, the slogan is that Sky and ITV must merge to take on the streaming giants. It sounds sensible. It always does. But those of us who have lived through similar moments know how these stories end: with fewer people making fewer programmes for smaller audiences.

What has surprised me over the past week is how many otherwise sensible people seem to think this is good news. Commentators have lined up to call it logical, even inevitable, as if size alone can solve structural decline. Yet few seem to have thought through who actually owns Sky or what the final upshot of this union would be. Sky is not a British company; it is a subsidiary of Comcast, one of America’s largest media conglomerates. Before we start applauding this as a bold act of British consolidation, we might stop to ask ourselves what we are really consolidating, and for whose benefit.

The logic being peddled is seductive. If you are fighting global behemoths like Netflix, Amazon or Apple, you need scale, right? In theory, yes. In practice, it is poison. When two large companies collide, the first things to be “rationalised” are always the people and the ideas that make each organisation distinct. The redundancy letters will be written before the press conference is over. Two commissioning heads become one, two digital teams are merged, two marketing departments are “aligned.” On paper this looks efficient; in reality, it replaces creativity with exhaustion.

Once the people are gone, the budgets follow. Maintaining two commissioning pots will be deemed “duplicative,” so the money is pooled, then quietly reduced. Before long, the new entity is indeed larger, but what appears on screen is smaller: cheaper shows, narrower ambition and a creeping sense that the numbers matter more than the stories. I have watched this happen too many times to mistake it for progress.

The “Why Now” Problem

To understand why this merger is even being discussed, you have to look at the pressures on both sides. ITV has been slow to pivot into a digital-first world. Its linear schedule still does the heavy lifting, but the arteries are clogged. ITVX was a step in the right direction, yet it remains an incremental response to a structural change. Sky, meanwhile, is facing problems of its own. The broadband business that underpins so much of its offer has been hampered by the national fiasco of BT’s high-speed fibre rollout. Years of underinvestment, weak government oversight and glacial project management have left Britain trailing behind Europe. Even Ofcom has admitted that our full-fibre coverage is late, patchy and overpriced. That is not Sky’s fault, but it has eaten into margins and customer trust.

Add to that a premium product that now looks expensive and inflexible in a world of month-by-month streamers, and you begin to see the logic. Sky needs customers; ITV believes it needs scale. Each hopes the other will provide salvation. Technically, ITV Studios is not part of the talks. It has been described as “off the table.” But that is precisely what makes this situation so dangerous. Studios is the part of the business that actually makes things: the division chasing international commissions and bringing work into the UK, the part that sustains the freelance economy. The health of ITV Studios, and indeed of every other indie, depends on broadcasters competing for ideas. If the biggest buyers consolidate, that competition evaporates. Prices drop, risk shrinks and the creative sector withers long before anyone realises what has been lost.

There is also a deeper strategic flaw. If Studios is hived off, the deal stops making sense even on its own commercial terms. The whole point of ITV’s model is vertical integration: the ability to commission, produce and sell content internationally. That loop of creation, broadcast and export is what gives ITV its leverage and its identity. Strip that away and what is left? A declining linear business weighed down by public-service regulation and an increasingly squeezed advertising market. It is hard to see why anyone, even Comcast, would want that without the creative engine attached. In trying to make the merger easier to pass through regulators, ITV may end up removing the very thing that made it desirable in the first place.

Unfortunately, the people deciding the fate of this merger - the politicians, lawyers and accountants - rarely see or even understand the creative fallout. They will look at the spreadsheets and nod approvingly. To them this will appear as sound industrial logic: fewer inefficiencies, more heft, a stronger balance sheet. What it will actually deliver is another round of asset-stripping followed by a slow, quiet fire-sale of British culture.

The Wall Street Play

This is not really about competing with Netflix; it is about copying Netflix’s balance sheet. We have seen the pattern before. When Discovery merged with Warner Bros., the rhetoric was all about synergy and integration. What followed was the division of the company into two halves, streaming and studios on one side, legacy television on the other and thousands of jobs lost with billions wiped off the market value. The only people who truly benefited were the shareholders and the chief executives who walked away with their bonuses intact.

The justification, as ever, was “falling ad revenues” and “dispersed audiences.” But the truth is simpler: viewers were leaving because the programmes were not very good. The obsession with scale produced bland, risk-averse content designed by committees of accountants in New York. And the same thing will happen here. People do not stop watching television because they suddenly want to read Proust or paint watercolours; they stop because they no longer see themselves or their stories on screen.

The pursuit of profit in media is only noble if that profit is reinvested in making more and better content. The problem is that creativity is inherently risky, and accountants dislike risk. So rather than back new voices, they buy existing audiences. It never works. The viewers who once watched Gangs of London on Sky and those who tune in for The Voice on ITV are not interchangeable. Merge the two and you alienate both. Consolidation always promises growth; it almost always ends in loss.

Bring Back the Kangaroo

If all this feels familiar, it is because we have been here before. In 2009 Project Kangaroo, a joint venture between ITV, the BBC and Channel 4, was poised to create a home-grown streaming platform years ahead of its time. The Competition Commission blocked it, declaring that such collaboration would be “anti-competitive.” Within a few years the same regulators happily welcomed Netflix, Amazon and Disney into the market, effectively dismantling the very industry they had sworn to protect.

Now history risks repeating itself, only in reverse. Instead of blocking a British partnership that could foster innovation, we may end up approving a foreign-owned merger that will kill competition altogether. And once one jewel falls, the rest will follow. Channel 4 will be next. Channel 5 is already gone. With every acquisition, more British ownership disappears offshore, and the diversity that made our broadcasting landscape so distinctive evaporates into a handful of global conglomerates.

Collaboration, Not Consolidation

There is another path as the dead on arrival Project Kangaroo demonstrated. The answer is not to build one lumbering mega-company pretending to be creative but to forge a genuinely collaborative ecosystem between the existing players. Imagine a shared technology spine for streaming, ad-sales and data, but with each broadcaster retaining its editorial independence. A network of strong, individual brands working together rather than consuming each other. That is how you compete with the streamers: not by mimicking their scale but by matching their ambition with our originality.

We are already starting to see meaningful collaboration. Channel 4 and UKTV have struck a multi-year content-carriage deal that will put hundreds of U-service titles on Channel 4’s streaming platform from January 2026. Meanwhile ITV and Disney+ have launched a unique UK partnership, exchanging curated rails of each other’s content under A Taste of ITVX and A Taste of Disney+. Imagine if a reborn Project Kangaroo were allowed to go further, where the whole of British TV and film sat under one shared digital roof.

For that to work, government has to help. We need tax incentives that attract private investment into production, fewer bureaucratic barriers to partnership and a BBC that acts as an engine for the creative economy rather than a fortress protecting its own walls. Not everything needs to be bought, sold or floated. Not everything has to exist on a spreadsheet. The faster the people in charge understand that, the sooner we can start building a sustainable future for British television.

The Stakes

This debate is not simply about corporate structure; it is about national identity and public responsibility. Television remains one of Britain’s crown jewels, a calling card for our creativity and our culture, but it is also a public good. ITV is not just another entertainment brand; it is a Public Service Broadcaster with obligations that run deeper than quarterly profit. It must provide impartial news, regional coverage, children’s programming and stories that reflect the breadth of British life.

If a company such as Comcast were to take control, those obligations would quickly become a nuisance rather than a mission. A global conglomerate will not see the PSB licence as a badge of honour; it will see it as a cost centre. And every time the company wants to trim its commissioning budget, it will point to the “regulatory burden” of public service as the excuse, arguing that news, regional output and other non-commercial strands make it too hard to turn a profit. The result would be predictable: fewer risky commissions, fewer distinctively British voices and a slow erosion of the very content that justifies ITV’s licence to broadcast in the first place.

Selling ITV to a purely commercial operator is not modernisation; it is abdication. It hands cultural stewardship to an overseas balance sheet and calls it strategy.

Lisa Nandy, the current Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, now faces a defining choice. If she approves this deal, she will be remembered as the minister who signed the death warrant for British broadcasting. If she blocks it, she gives the industry a chance to reinvent itself before it is too late.

The future lies in collaboration, not consolidation, and in protecting public service, not selling it off.